Song of Solomon
A Sermon preached by the Precentor, Canon Anna Macham
Sunday 11 August 2024- 10:30am
Jeremiah 2:1-7, 10-15 and John 20:11-18
Sixteen years ago, a startling musical discovery was made. Leafing through a bibliography of 16th-century music prints, academic and conductor Laurie Stras stumbled across a collection of 23 motets that had been anonymously published in 1543. Probably because they were published anonymously, these motets had lain forgotten and unseen, unsung for almost four centuries.
For various reasons, it’s thought that they may have been composed by an Italian nun called Leonora D’Este (see Sisters doing it for themselves: radical motets from a 16th-century nunnery | Classical music | The Guardian). D’Este was from a wealthy family in the Italian city of Ferrara, and her mother was the notorious Lucrezia Borgia, a noblewoman and illegitimate daughter of Pope Alexander VI and his Roman mistress, and a central figure of the infamous Borgia family of the Italian Renaissance (see Lucrezia Borgia – Wikipedia). One of the motets, which is incredibly beautiful- and haunting- to listen to is called “Sicut lilium inter spinas,” and has recently been recorded by the all-female American vocal group Lyyra (see VOCES8 announces Lyyra: ‘Sicut Lilium’ by Leonora d’Este (youtube.com)). And it takes as its text the second verse of our reading from Song of Solomon: “As a lily among brambles, so is my love among maidens” (Song of Solomon 2:2).
One of the attractions of the Song of Solomon as a book is its privileging of the female voice. D’Este, if the piece was by her, was not the first nun to compose or perform works that set texts from this evocative collection of love poems. Hildegard of Bingen, a well-respected Benedictine Abbess, who was composing four centuries before in the Rhineland in Germany was also heavily influenced by its colourful, erotic imagery. And a later nun and abbess from Ferrara, Raffaella Aleotti, also set further verses from today’s reading, in her sacred motet “Surge, propera amica”. The collection Aleotti’s piece was published in in 1593 is the earliest book of sacred compositions we know of to be credited in print to a woman.
Of course, we know that this text, “Arise, my love, my fair one,” and others from the Song of Solomon, were set by plenty of male medieval and Renaissance composers too- such as Palestrina or Victoria, to give just two examples. These texts were important in the Church calendar of the time, not because of their literal meaning as a lush and sensuous love poem between a man and a woman, but because of their allegorical or symbolic readings.
As is often noted, God is not mentioned at all in Song of Solomon. But from the Church Father Origen onwards, God’s presence was understood to be implicit in this text. And the love described, while having its origins in carnal love, was seen as purely spiritual- otherwise, the reasoning went, why would it have been included in the bible, a sacred text, in the first place? Origen even went so far as castrating himself to make the point.
In this understanding, rather than it being about male/female love, the poem is about the relationship between the divine and the human, and the love that exists between God, or Christ, and his Church; the male voice represents the divine and the female the Church. Today’s verses were set for feast days of the Blessed Virgin Mary, because Mary, in the Roman Catholic Church of the time, was viewed as the real and mystical bride of Christ, or as representing the Christian soul.
In this complex web of allusions, Song of Solomon also became associated with another Mary in the bible, Mary Magdalene, a human being irresistibly drawn to, and searching for, Christ, and verses from the book are still set in our own worship calendar for her feast day in July.
But perhaps the Song of Solomon particularly appealed to the female nun composers not just because of its association with prominent biblical women, but also because of the strong focus in this book on the woman’s point of view, which is highly unusual in the Hebrew Bible.
Nowadays, the book is usually seen as a collection of different love poems that have been brought together by an editor, rather than as one coherent single work with a beginning, a middle and an end. And it’s certainly not generally now regarded as having been authored by Solomon, as its name implies- though his supposed authorship undoubtedly played a part in getting it accepted into the canon of scripture in the first place.
As a narrative, it doesn’t really hold together. The poems have a dream-like, visionary quality. Most of them are delivered through the poetic convention of an “I”, a first-person voice that can be either female or male. But it’s notable that, overall, the woman’s voice speaks more than the man’s, taking up almost two-thirds of the text. There’s a sense of mutuality, and open-mindedness about the relationship being described, that- rather shockingly- doesn’t necessarily even seem to imply that the relationship’s consummation will be in marriage.
As one recent commentator puts it, in the Song of Solomon, “the female voices far outstrip the male voices… Female voices search; male voices tease and escape. Females become lovesick; males allow themselves to be found and led to the “mother’s house” (fathers [being] as absent from the Song as the figure of a God.) Females are articulate…, unconventional risk-takers. Males are loving but less adventurous” (Athalya Brenner, “The Song of Solomon”, The Oxford Bible Commentary, ed. John Barton and John Muddiman, 2001, p.431).
The text bears this out. Piling up image after image, of nature and the seasons, mountains, hills, valleys and plains, and various plants and animals, it builds up a picture of erotic longing and bliss- until finally the woman wanders all over the city searching for her beloved, and is reprimanded and beaten by the city sentinels: “I arose to open to my beloved, but my beloved had turned and was gone. My soul failed me when he spoke, I sought him but did not find him. I called him, but he gave no answer”. In today’s passage, the poetry is lush and evocative, love’s association with Spring characterising it as fresh and innocent, yet sensuously appealing. The woman expresses an eagerness to savour its pleasures, but later on there is also a reserve before it that is respectful and demure.
Perhaps there was something about this female voice that appealed to composers like D’Este or Aleotti. In most secular courtly love poetry of the time that was being set to music, the woman was the silent object and the man the speaking subject. But texts like the Song of Songs allowed women, or those women who were nuns at least, to speak and sing in their own voice, a specifically female voice. Through its words, they could express physical and spiritual desires, in meditative, devotional works addressed to Christ, that could not be articulated directly in the language of courtly love (see Laurie Stras, Women and Music in Sixteenth-Century Ferrara, CUP, 2018, p.13).
The very title “Song of Solomon,” or “Song of Songs,” as it’s also known, defines this book as a composition to be sung and performed. Yet for a long time, the only performances of it were in the context of liturgy. Jewish tradition, from the first century onwards, frowned upon the practice of it being chanted in public houses- so important was it deemed to safeguard the purely “spiritual” interpretation of the words.
But now, it seems, it’s much more acceptable, even in Church, to celebrate the Song of Solomon as a straightforward affirmation of sexual love, a celebration of mutually loving relationships. The main liturgical occasion now when we might expect to hear the Song of Solomon read is a wedding, or perhaps a funeral. Probably my favourite verses in the whole thing are from the conclusion, the climax of the work, in Chapter 8, “Love is strong as death…Many waters cannot quench love,” (8: 6-7), a recognition that the love we experience in our closest relationships is what gives life meaning, and that this love is eternal.
Whereas in the early Church, and in medieval times, it seemed necessary to defend the allegorical reading of Song of Solomon against the literal one, with physical or sexual desire being associated with sin and the flesh, now it seems that both meanings of love in the Christian tradition- physical desire and spiritual yearning- can be simultaneously affirmed. The two are interconnected, and you don’t have to make a choice between the two.
The Song of Songs is a celebration of human love and erotic bliss, where each partner respects and accepts the mysterious otherness of their beloved, each sometimes leading and sometimes following in the relationship. Elsewhere in scripture, the love of God for his Church is explicitly compared to the relationship between a man and a woman- taken together, these different biblical texts, with Song of Songs, amount to an affirmation of relationship in its spiritual and physical expressions, and a celebration of love in all its beautiful and diverse forms.
Amen.