To begin with this week I’m bringing back some material that I wrote two years ago about the Mozart Requiem. Hey, we’re all in favor of recycling, aren’t we? I was struck by Rutter’s choice to put two sheep- or lamb-related sections together; the “Agnus Dei” from the Latin Mass and Psalm 23 as it is worded in the Book of Common Prayer.
So here’s what I wrote about the “Agnus Dei” back then:
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi-–
“Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world”
This line is an almost exact quotation from the Gospel of John 1:29: “The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.” John’s hearers would have been very familiar with the idea of a sacrificial lamb. Animals were still being sacrificed at the Temple in Jerusalem at this time, many of them lambs. (Those sacrifices would end in 70 A.D. with the destruction of the Temple by Roman legions under Titus.) The Feast of Passover centered around a lamb, commemorating Israel’s deliverance from slavery and also from God’s judgment, as He “passed over” the households that had slaughtered a lamb and put its blood on the doorposts and lintels of their homes. But the idea of a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world would have been new.
The last book in the Christian New Testament, Revelation, repeatedly refers to Christ as a lamb. (Revelation was written by John the Apostle, who also wrote the Gospel quoted above. He’s not the same John as the one who called Jesus the Lamb of God. That was John the Baptist, a different person entirely. As far as we know, John the Baptist didn’t write anything.) One representative verse is from verse 12 of chapter 5: “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain.” (You’ll almost certainly recognize that phrase from Handel’s Messiah.) And of course there are many, many references throughout the New Testament to Christ’s death as being a sacrifice for sins. So it’s understandable that this central Christian doctrine would be given its own section in the requiem mass. (And, to reference Rutter specifically here, why he included it in his non-traditional requiem.)
You may be curious about the word “agnus.” Why is it so different from the word “lamb”? Many Latin words closely resemble English ones, so why doesn’t this one? All I could dig up on the two words was that the Latin resembles ancient Greek while the English has Germanic roots. Be sure, by the way, that you don’t confuse “agnus” with “angus,” which can be either a Scottish first name or a breed of cattle. You can, however, associate “agnus” with the female first name “Agnes,” which used to be much more common than it is nowadays. The actual name comes from a Greek word that means “pure or chaste” but which closely resembles the word for “lamb.” (I’m not going to try to reproduce the actual Greek here.) A Roman Catholic saint, Agnes, known for her chastity and martyred under the Roman emperor Diocletian, became associated with the lamb because of that resemblance; paintings of her usually show her with a lamb. But my favorite Agnes comes from Charles Dickens. She’s the unsung heroine of David Copperfield (well, unsung until almost the end, when David finally realizes that she’s the one for him) and her name has to have been deliberately chosen by Dickens to conjure up nobility and self-sacrifice. The last lines of the novel are:
O Agnes, O my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me, like the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward!
Dickens may have put more theology into that ending than he realized. Although David seems to be placing his trust in a mere human, his wording (with a different reference point) would also fit perfectly into the Requiem text.
Now on to some new material about words that don’t occur in the standard requiem text. Section 6 is taken from Psalm 23, authored by King David, who started out his career as a shepherd boy, thus knew a thing or two about sheep, and so used his knowledge to write an extended metaphor about God’s direction of His people. Here and there you can pick up references to those flocks that David spent so many hours tending:
“a green pasture”–The shepherd had to constantly move his sheep around so that they had enough to eat.
“lead me forth”–Sheep aren’t very good at finding their own way but have to be led.
“waters of comfort”–Refers literally to “still waters,” since sheep don’t like to drink from running water.
“rod and staff”–A rod is a club, which would be used to beat off predators, and a staff would have a U-shaped bend to fit around the neck of a sheep or lamb, making it possible for the shepherd to pull an animal out of a hole or back from danger.
By the time we get to the end of the psalm, though, David has gone through the valley of the shadow of death and is feasting at a table, having left the sheep pasture far behind. The oil on the head and the overflowing wine cup speak of the great abundance God gives. The ending line, “and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever” leads beautifully into the last section of the Requiem, “Lux Aeterna,” with its image of eternal rest, peace and light.
And I’ll leave it there. Let that beautiful image rest in your mind as you sing–or listen!
