At choir practice a week ago, I teared up. I’m not in the habit of frequently tearing up. I don’t think I’ve become like the late James Cagney who later in life would often not just tear up, but openly cry in public when recalling something from a halcyon past.
The reason I teared up was “Jupiter.” Being an aging astronomy buff, I do regard Jupiter as a “dear old acquaintance” of many evenings and mornings of my life. And even though my eye would sometimes “tear up” at my telescope’s frozen eyepiece in Winter, the planetary “Jupiter” wasn’t at fault this time.
I knew Jupiter as the planet even before I learned of its “godhood” at the feet of my East Rowan Latin teacher, Mrs. Thayer Puckett (well, not exactly “at the feet,” since I was a high school teenager, but she did have that “aura of ancient divinity” about her).
At choir practice, the culprit for my tearing up was “Jupiter” disguised as a choir anthem. The preferred musical term for “disguised” would be “adapted” or “arranged.” The anthem was titled “O God, Beyond All Praising.” In Britain, the tune is called “To My Country, Thee I Vow.”
This tune was composed by the English composer Gustav Holst in 1918 as the theme for the planet Jupiter in his composition, “The Planets.” The family was of Swedish extraction, and the dropping of the “von” from “von Holst” was timely, as Kaiser Wilhelm II was already engaging in some pre-World War I saber rattling.
Although I’m not a World War I veteran (and neither is anyone else, now), when I looked at the choir anthem sheet music and saw the year “1918” next to the name “Holtz,” it all came back to me (the “it” meaning Music Appreciation 101 under Dr. Dellinger at Appalachian in the early 1970s.)
Through some type of oversight, Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” was not included on Voyager I’s gold record! (I mean, really, “The Planets!” Go figure!).
This theme is a stately one, befitting of a stately nation and empire upon which, at one time, the sun never set. This stately “King” of the planets, this grand “orb” in the sky, “this Jupiter” does have a sunset and night, but due to swift rotation, night (and day) only lasts 5 hours.
Jupiter would be a great North Star “To hang one’s hat on,” much easier found than Polaris, except for the fact that as a planet, “It moves” (borrowing part of a phrase about the Earth uttered by Galileo under his breath following his recanting of what he knew to be fact).
Just like the trenches of World War I, Jupiter has gas (methane and ammonia), but in frozen form which would not smart the eyes, nose, or lungs.
Holst was a contemporary of young British composers such as Bandmaster Cecil Coles who was killed by a German sniper on the Western Front. In fact, Coles sent Holst a manuscript of one of his compositions which contained some other “markings” not musical (dried blood and mud marks, along with some embedded shell shrapnel).
Young German composers and musicians were also killed in World War I, along with those young British and Allied musicians and poets we often hear of, such as the Canadian physician Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae who wrote the poem: “In Flanders Fields.”
I can’t help wondering if a soldier, talented in composition or musicianship, would pull the trigger on another soldier, if he knew him to be similarly talented (but then, the “cutthroat” competition for “first chair,” and that of a tenor and soprano trying to outdo each other is legend).
At our choir anthem’s performance this past Sunday, Veteran’s (Armistice) Day, I couldn’t help tearing up as we sang that stately song, its sound drifting out past stately church columns toward a Heaven wherein reside great groups of souls long over the initial shock of their unexpected, premature arrival there.
And with home planet fading in the distance, the stately tune then passing the gaze of its theme planet’s Great Red “Eye.”