Mozart and bagpipes

It was a beautiful Sunday morning. I decided to walk to church, where I was meeting my friend Max, who'd invited me weeks before to come to this service because they were having a small orchestra to play a Mozart Mass setting. As I began to approach Lafayette Square (the park just immediately north of the White House), I heard the distinctive wails of a bagpipe band. As I got closer, there was a big crowd in the center east part of the square watching a band of pipers and drummers from the French Army. Not sure what the occasion was.

Anyway, as you can probably surmise, I was going to church at St. John's Lafayette Square, the "Church of the Presidents." It's an old, 1815-vintage cracker box-style church that's still fairly intact with original (uncomfortable) furnishings and design. The rather simple stained glass windows inside were designed by the artisans at Chartres Cathedral in France. This is the church where President Bush goes on those rare occasions he goes to church in D.C. They have valet parking here, but I've no idea where they take the cars. Max met me on the plaza outside the west doors before the service and began introducing me to folks....I do believe that he knows everybody....but he has been a member there for years.

It seems as though the parish has a Mozart service with special music and orchestra every fall. There was no particular holy day that Sunday, so it's just a tradition they have. This year, the Mass setting was the Missa brevis in F, K. 192, from 1774 when Mozart was but 18, and they used selections from Vesperae solennes de confessore, K. 339, for anthems. An orchestra of ten with organ continuo played the service. St. John's has a tiny choir with just a dozen singers, but they sound good in the space. In the east end of the church, the space narrows for the rather small and crowded sanctuary, with the northern corner filled with the organ pipe chamber and the southern corner for the organ and, on this Sunday, the orchestra. The choir sat in front of the organ pipes.

The service began with the Kyrie movement sung as a choral prelude. They would later sing the Gloria and the Sanctus/Benedictus in their proper places in the liturgy; the Agnus Dei was sung during communion, rather than prior as part of the liturgy. I noticed the conspicuous absence of the Credo, and they didn't even recite a creed during the service, even though the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer direct that the Nicene Creed is to be said or sung on all Sundays. Hymns for the service were Creation for the processional, a very slow King's Weston as the sequence, two verses of Forest Green as a presentation hymn following the offertory, and Austria for the recessional. An Anglican chant by the parish's organist/choirmaster got sung for the Psalm; I wasn't sure if the congregation was supposed to sing along or not, so I sang it quietly. From the Solemn Vespers, Dixit Dominus was the offertory anthem and Laudate Dominum was the communion anthem. I thought the soprano soloist for the Laudate, Claire Kuttler, was particularly good. The postlude was Church Sonata in B-flat, K.212.

One of their priestesses was the principal celebrant, but the rector and an assisting priest were there as concelebrants, so I was able to take communion. The liturgy was a kind of weird, quasi-inclusive language version of Rite 2. The priestess didn't chant anything. She also didn't do the elevations and genuflections during the consecration, but I gather she's rather low church. She didn't wear a chasuble during the consecration and was vested only in alb and stole. There was a bit of a comical moment when she started to continue with the prayer of consecration after the Sanctus but before the Benedictus. Because of all the extra musicians, they couldn't use the altar rail, so they had to do the distribution of communion Catholic-style. Their communion wine was really sweet; I suspect they used Mogen David or something similarly hideous.

The rector, Father León, preached. He's always a good speaker. The gospel reading for the day was that troublesome "easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle" passage from St. Mark, so he had to preach on that topic, noting the irony of being told to sell everything and give the money to the poor when he was standing in a rich parish in the middle of a capital campaign. He explained how nine out of ten couples who came to him for counseling about marital problems had money issues at the root. He also made one analogy I thought was interesting: in this gospel passage, he says the opposite of rich is not poor, the opposite of rich is free.

After the service and the postlude, there was a lunch in the parish hall, but Max and I didn't stay, as we were headed out to brunch. More on that in another post.


Choir and clergy during the Sanctus.