Conversion

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION BY IDA HABBESTAD

In Wergeland’s collection «The Jew» (1842), a mullah, a rabbi, and a Christian priest meet. They seek shelter by the same oasis, converse through the night, and at sunrise they praise their respective Gods, all on an equal footing. In this way, Wergeland insists on the equality of all people and of their faiths.

Wergeland’s text was an intervention on behalf of the rights of Jews in Norway. For the Jewish Felix Mendelssohn, Christian baptism may have served as a strategic protection, but in his music his faith is more structural than calculated. Mendelssohn taught the world to listen to Bach anew, but first he himself attended the school of counterpoint. When the chorale «Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ» pushes its way through a restless web of harmony in the final movement of the Piano Trio (1845), it functions not as an external quotation, but as an inner credo.

Changing religion can be a radical shift. When Sarah Levett met Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, she was persuaded and turned away from her Jewish origins. The year before, she had married Johan Svendsen, who during this period orchestrated Schumann’s «Abendlied». Their marriage became turbulent. It is said that Bergljot inspired Ibsen’s «Hedda Gabler» – a woman out of step with her own interior and imprisoned by the expectations of others. Svendsen’s lyrical intimacy in the violin Romance can be heard against the backdrop of such personal upheaval.

Wagner himself sought a different kind of transcendence. The «Wesendonck Lieder» contain Christian imagery, but also a pull toward Eastern philosophy. He no longer sought a return home to the tonic, but created a chromatic exhalation as the colour of unfulfilled earthly desire, resolved only in longing and in death.

We do not know for certain why human beings seek something greater than themselves. The movement may perhaps have no full stop. But Wergeland’s words can offer a foundation: «Every religion has a gentle and loving heart».