To help begin your journey through these forty days and forty nights, delve into Allegri’s unmatched masterpiece Miserere mei, Deus, composed in the 1630’s under the reign of Pope Urban VIII, around the time of Galileo’s infamous trial; make of that what you will.
Below that, we have Bach’s transcendent Saint Matthew’s Passion, composed almost exactly a century afterward, in 1727. Bach also composed a Passion on the text of Saint John, to which we will provide a link soon. But enjoy this while ye may, dear reader, for beauty lifts the soul more than words might.