Baroque catharsis

For one wallowing in the Slough of Despond it seemed appropriate to go to a performance of ‘Tears of St. Peter’ verses of Luigi Tansillo set to music by Orlando Lassus in 1595, his last work. It was billed as ‘An emotionally charged sequence of twenty sacred madrigals in seven parts.’ The words of each are agonisingly painful as St. Peter wallows in - self pity? Self castigation and bitterness at ‘life’ which he feels has engulfed him and led him to the final terrible betrayal.

Happily the lyrics were in Italian and the music itself didn’t really seem to reflect this agony of mind. It was a long programme, we arrived early to bag a good spot, (so early we caught the rehearsal which is when I took the photos) the chairs we were sitting on were horribly uncomfortable, but after a while the voices started to flood over me and I got quite lost in it. Nearly three hours passed I believe, and I came away feeling refreshed.

The setting was the wonderful Abbey of Pluscarden, about four miles away. Set in a deep green valley, once very isolated, with a long history that began in 1230 when it was founded by King Alexander of Scotland and housed the Valliscaulins, a strict order akin to the Benedictines. It flourished for a while until it attracted the unwonted attention of local badboy, Alexander Stuart, known now as the Wolf of Badenoch, who, in anger at an unfavourable decision on his marital status by the Bishop of Moray, fired it along with Elgin Cathedral and Forres in 1390. There are still marks of this fire to be seen on the old walls left standing.

Despite this the Priory survived throughout the Reformation struggling on for over a century until it fell into ruin and was almost abandoned around 1662 apart from local worship. In 1948 the work of restoration began and is ongoing to this day with the monks themselves still working on replacing plain glass with gloriously coloured stained glass windows, of which I am an avid fan.