When
he was a young seminarian, the teacher in Luigi Giussani’s singing class played
a recording of an aria from a Donizetti opera, “Spirto gentil” (“Gentle spirit,
you once shone in my dreams, but after, I lost you forever. . . .”). At that
moment, Giussani “understood for the first time that God existed, and thus that
nothing could exist without a meaning; that the heart could not exist
unless the heart’s goal existed: happiness.”
Many
years later, after founding Communion and Liberation—a lay movement within the
Catholic Church—Father Giussani started and directed a series of compact discs, named Spirto
Gentil, that included many of the great
composers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some of the masterpieces
of church music, and collections of folk songs from various national
traditions. The English translations of his introductions to the booklets that
accompanied the compact discs have finally been gathered together, revised, and
published in book form.
Giussani
heard in music a privileged way of perceiving beauty as the splendor of truth,
capable of arousing and keeping alive the desire for “infinite beauty,”
recognizing it as one way through which the Mystery speaks to the heart of man.
Spirto Gentil thus introduces us not only to the elements of musical
form but above all it accompanies us in a search for the ultimate meaning of
existence.
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