MILLIONS of people around the world tuned in to a very unusual concert last Sunday – world-renowned opera singer Andrea Bocelli singing at the Duomo Cathedral in Milan, Italy.
He had been invited by the mayor of Milan and authorities of the church to sing at a concert for Easter Sunday. There was no audience in the cathedral itself because of the national coronavirus lockdown in all of Italy, second only to the United States in the number of COVID-19 deaths.
But the concert was seen and heard around the world via YouTube.
The opera star sang the Catholic hymns “Panis Angelicus,” “Ave Maria,” “Sancta Maria,” and “Domine Deus.” Then on the steps of the cathedral, he sang “Amazing Grace,” a hymn written in 1772 by English poet and Anglican clergyman John Newton.
When Bocelli was invited to sing in the unusual concert, he had readily agreed, saying it would not be a performance or a concert, but a prayer. “I will go there to pray and I’d like to think that everyone listening to me can pray with me,” he said.
Thus, at the concert, he said, “I believe in the strength of praying together. I believe in the Christian Easter, a universal symbol of rebirth that everyone – whether they are believers or not – truly needs right now.” He added: “Thanks to music, streamed live, bringing together millions of clasped hands everywhere in the world, we will hug this wounded Earth’s pulsing heart.”
“Amazing Grace,” which he sang to end his concert, is said to be the most famous of the folk hymns sung in the English-speaking world. It was sung in the Baptist and Methodist evangelizing of the American South in the 19th century. It became an emblematic black spiritual, a part of the revival of folk music in the United States in the 1960s, and recorded thousands of times in the 20th century.
“Amazing Grace – how sweet the sound – that saved a wretch like me,” it begins. “I once was lost but now am found. Was blind but now I see.”
In the wretched conditions that millions of people around the world are in today, its message of forgiveness regardless of sins committed, of rising above the depths, it was a hymn of hope for the millions of people around the world today caught in the depths of the despair of the coronavirus pandemic.
