McCartney: From Classic to Classical
Paul McCartney is (still) not dead. He's just writing music in a dead language.
The former Beatle will release Ecce Cor Meum (Behold My Heart in Latin), his fourth album of classical music, on Sept. 26.
McCartney's latest oeuvre was commissioned by Britain's Magdalen College Oxford more than eight years ago in celebration of a new concert hall. It is an oratorio in four movements, scored for choir and orchestra, with the text combining both English, and to a lesser extent, Latin.
The singer said he incorporated Latin into the piece because of his love for the language, which he learned as a student at the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys.
"As Latin is known and sung by choirs all over the world, I felt it would be appropriate to use at times during the piece," he said in a statement.
Making the piece was a learning experience for the artist, who said the work only came together after a lot of trial and error.
"If it had been a Beatles song I would have known how to do it," McCartney said in a statement. "But this was a completely different ball game."
McCartney said his aim was to create "a choral piece, which could be sung by young people the world over in the same way that Handel's Messiah is."
His prior three classical albums were 1991's Liverpool Oratorio, 1997's Standing Stone and 1999's Working Classical. The first two were generally panned by critics, while the third was better received.
In other news from Sir Paul, he officially filed for divorce from estranged wife Heather Mills McCartney last week, citing her "argumentative" and "unreasonable behavior" in his court documents.
Mills McCartney, in turn, vowed to file her own counterclaims "about matters both in this country [England] and America," her spokesman Phil Hall said in a statement Saturday.
So much for an amicable split.
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