Russian Easter Overture

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Russian Easter Overture

Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral piece “Russian Easter Overture” premiered during Christmas of 1888. This is not necessarily an irony since, as the old saying goes, there is no Easter without Christmas and no Christmas without Easter.

REO lasts about as long as “Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie,” that once well-known whine about the local and the temporary, but is a sound poem that celebrates the universal and the transcendent. REO begins very solemnly with echoes of Russian Orthodox hymnology as an image of the grimness of Holy Saturday: Jesus has been murdered and all is darkness and waiting. The music then transitions to the glory of the Resurrection on Easter morning, and finally in the third part is light and frivolous, symbolizing the innocent fun of feasting and merriment that is fitting and proper in its time and place.

The progression of the piece, then, is mourning, joy, and secular delight, all sanctioned by God.

But here’s a problem: to understand the Russian Easter Overture in any of its parts one would have to know more about the Easter than plastic Easter eggs made by slaves in China toiling under their argus-eyed masters.

This is not to deny that Easter eggs should be hunted, even though whole forests have been leveled by Republican (no doubt) chainsaws so that bleak, humorless scriveners sourcing Jack Chick comics could write newspaper articles (their number is legion) denouncing Easter eggs as pagan.

Well, they probably are.

And so are Christmas trees. And, come to think of it, marriage pre-dates Christianity too.

But as St. Teresa of Avila said, there is a time for penance and there is a time for partridge, the partridge part meaning a good, merry meal with lots of jokes and laughter.

I am sorry that I can’t remember anything else St. Teresa said; I should have paid better attention in Sunday school.

Our parents taught us that dessert comes after the meat-and-potatoes. First we eat a good, solid, no-nonsense meal so that we may enjoy good health, and then, if we have been good, we are permitted ice cream or cake. Easter is like that, and so is Christmas. First comes the sense, and then comes the nonsense, and both are good in their proper sequence.

One reads of such events as community Easter egg hunts being held not after Easter morning, but before, and even on Good Friday, and that is teaching our children that they may gorge themselves on candy and not bother with the meat and vegetables at all.

And speaking of vegetables, you may have noticed that most of the secular calendars and even some Christian ones have been bullied this year into recognizing next Friday as Earth Day, which is silly at best. On this planet every day is an earth day, just as on Venus every day is a venusian day. C. S. Lewis, in his brilliant A Preface to Paradise Lost, observes that in Milton’s brilliant poem Adam and Eve, who became too proud to bow to God, ended up humbling themselves before a tree, a really large vegetable. Enviros have never met any created life form, including an amoeba or paramecium, to which they are unwilling to degrade themselves and sacrifice other humans.

Rimsky-Korsakov remembered what he was taught in Sunday school, and so did not write the “Russian Earth Day Overture.”

-30-