Dimecres de Cendra (Ash Wednesday)

Since the world is already so beautiful, Lord,

And if we behold it with your peace in our eyes,

What else could you give us in another life?

So begins Maragall’s famous Cant Espiritual. In Dimecres de Cendra, he personifies this dilemma of faith as a lovely young woman attending mass and the priest who would put ash on her forehead to symbolise the mortality and sinfulness the church wishes her to feel. With its seven ‘no’s’, it is typical of the modernist poet’s ambivalence towards certain institutions (he was in other ways a devout catholic) and his natural feminism.

This setting conveys the tension at the heart of the poem by juxtaposing the music of two composers, an old master and myself. Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere mei, composed for the Sistine Chapel in around 1638 (and supposedly written out from memory by the fourteen-year-old Mozart) is now sung all over the world, often on Ash Wednesday. My music, for female voices only, grew from the little ornament on the words ‘de la taula’.

(Ian Shaw)