In the week which began with the observance of Candlemas, or the commemoration of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, what better to reflect on than a nunc dimittis. That said, the particular example I’m thinking of is not really a nunc, simply because it is not in Latin but rather in Church Slavonic, so it is really rather Ныне отпущаеши, and it is the fifth movement of the Свеноћно бденије (all-night vigil) as set by Сергей Васильевич Рахманинов (that is, Sergei Rachmaninoff).

The Vigil is an a capella work drawing (as required by the Orthodox Church) on traditional chants, though also showing both the composer’s own originality and his debt to Tchaikovsky. It was written, apparently rather quickly, in the early years of the First World War, in Russia before the Revolutions on 1917 led to Rachmaninoff leaving the country. The fifth movement, setting the Song of Simeon, is sometimes said to have been a favourite of the composer himself, and at least one biographer notes that he requested to have it sung at his funeral.

A significant part of the musical effect of the work comes from the main melody, sung by a tenor soloist, sitting in the middle of the texture: altos and the other tenors (some of them only humming at points) surround the melody with a gently rocking harmonic bed; sopranos enter about a third of the way through and give an ethereal counterpoint; basses join for the second half giving more of a grounding, and leave their mark on any listener by ending on a profound low B flat. Simeon, in this setting, sings his canticle in the midst of the business of the temple, rocking the infant Christ, perhaps, given the harmonic surround, and the counterpoint to his song from the upper voice must surely be heard as angelic.

The overall effect, so sensitively delivered by a composer who is not understood to have been particularly pious, is both reverend and touching; if any music can be said to be a prayer (though of course the premise of this blog is that most if not all music can be!) this can.