As the Angel sang, tears filled my eyes and flowed down my cheeks. The voice of mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung voice rose so beautifully as she gave expression to Cardinal Newman’s words and Edward Elgar’s music that I could not help but weep.

With Ben Zander conducting the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra in Symphony Hall and the Chorus Pro Musica assisting, the “Dream of Gerontius” stirred my depths last week, as it always does. This musical drama of a soul’s journey through death to heaven never fails to move me with the wonder of it all.

I had last heard this favorite piece performed in 1992 in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, another splendid site for this oratorio. On that occasion too, I remember how beautifully Catherine Wyn-Rogers  sang the angel. And in1982 I had heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra do it with Jessye Norman singing the same role.

Such esthetic events often lead me to reflect on early educational experiences, on what counts in the long run, and what does not. Two kinds of experiences in particular stand out.

The first took place when I was in the early grades in the Belmont public schools. There, amazingly enough, each week we used to hear each performances of the NBC Symphony Orchestra over the radio. The broadcasts came into our classrooms through the public address system and we listened while sitting at our desks.

At a distance of more than sixty years, it seems almost incredible to me now that this ever happened. And yet, it turned out to be one of the most formative influences in my life. Listening to classical music gave me a cultural resource of such importance that it has fed my soul all through the intervening decades. I will always remember with appreciation Walter Damrosch, the orchestra’s then conductor, and the far-sighted leaders of our public schools who made the performances part of our curriculum.

Of course, many other influences combined to foster my love for music as I grew up. An adopted aunt, in particular, helped by giving me a record player so that I could play operatic performances and other music for myself. She is the one who took me backstage after a Metropolitan Opera performance of La Traviata to meet the star Eleanor Steber who had been her longtime friend.

I remember with awe the diva in her dressing room, splendidly costumed and her breast still heaving after the exertions of the leading role. The experience stamped on my psyche the glamour of the opera stage and the excitement of big-time performances.

The other educational experience that has stayed with me is memorizing poetry. This practice, too, has been largely abandoned despite the almost universal testimony of those of us over a certain age who still relish its benefits.

Surprisingly, my Shakespeare professor in sophomore year at Harvard College, F. O. Matthiessen, gave us long sections of Troilus and Cressida and King Lear to memorize. I still love the passage from the second of these plays “O reason not the need / Our basest beggars are in the poorest things superfluous” and think of these lines when I see people panhandling in Harvard Square. Or the one from the infrequently performed Troilus that begins “Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back / Wherein he puts alms for Oblivion.”

I treasure this legacy from a man who, it later turned out, was deeply troubled himself. In 1950 he plunged from a window in Boston’s Hotel Manger to his death many floors below.

In the long run, the fine arts prove more valuable for some of us than the pragmatic things we had to study in school. Certainly they were of greater worth than many of the dry rationalistic philosophy and theology courses I took later.

Those radio broadcasts that we elementary school students heard each week were powerful influences with lasting power. Do any public schools provide this kind of listening education for students now? Most of the young people whom I know are utterly unfamiliar with the great tradition.

And how many carry in their memories lines of great poetry such as those from Shakespeare’s plays? Not many at all, I would wager. It would surprise me to discover that any current Harvard professors were assigning memorization.

And yet last week I attended a memorial service for an eminent philosopher who died on Christmas Day of last year. One of the speakers recalled that the philosopher was fond of quoting the whole of Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “The Raven,” as well as other favorite pieces. He also could recite with pleasure large swatches of Gilbert and Sullivan.

Readers will recall cultural influences from their own lives that have proven to have remarkable staying power. These are the experiences that continue to humanize us and make our later life richer in memory and current affect.

Richard Griffin