Review
Culture
Faith
Music
5 min read

Faith in Beethoven

Why did Beethoven, the hero of humanism, write music for a mass? Musicologist Daniel Chua explores the maestro’s faith.

Daniel KL Chua is a musicologist and Professor and Chair of music at the University of Hong Kong. He writes on music, particularly Beethoven, and the intersection between music, philosophy and theology. 

Agrand statue of Beethoven as a classical hero seats him on a throne on a dias.
Max Klinger’s Beethoven monument.

Bach’s theological credentials are impeccable, as Jeremy Begbie wrote about previously for Seen & Unseen. But Beethoven’s? Not really. In fact, not at all. Most scholars on Beethoven see him as a secularizing force. If Bach represent the summit of theological expression in western music history, then Beethoven is the poster boy of the Enlightenment progress. He spells the end of sacred music. In the narrative of music history, Beethoven is the catalyst for a new secular epoch. After Beethoven, music is no longer about God but humanity; sacred music drops out from the historical narrative as something irrelevant or even regressive to the progress of modernity.  

But it is not just any Beethoven who wields this secularising power. It is a very particular Beethoven, more myth than man. This is Beethoven as Promethean hero. He overcomes his deafness by defiance, grabbing fate by the throat as it knocks loudly in the opening bars of the Fifth symphony - da-da-da-daaaa! - and triumphing over its C-minor threat in a glorious blaze of C major in the finale.  The symphony is a musical model of human self-determination. It projects Beethoven as a revolutionary artist living in revolutionary times, channelling the anticlerical and antimonarchist fervour of the French Revolution in musical form. His story is one of freedom and autonomy; and his music is made in his image, free from servitude to church and court, and free to be itself.  

This Promethean image precludes Beethoven from being a sacred composer. It is not that he isn’t a sacred composer; rather, he can’t be one in this historical narrative. In fact, Beethoven stands as a rival to the sacred, because by the beginning of the 20th Century, artists such as Max Klinger were building shrines to the composer: Beethoven is the high priest of an art religion. 

The Beethoven monument

A statue of a seat hero, Beethoven, sits on a raised dais in a purpsoe built rom
Max Klinger’s Beethoven monument.

The Vienna Secession’s fourteenth exhibition in 1902 was a shrine dedicated to Beethoven with Max Klinger ‘s monument as the altar. 

But there is a problem. Beethoven wrote sacred music. Not much, admittedly, but enough, including what he declared to be his ‘greatest work’ – the Missa Solemnis. So in order to uphold a more secular Beethoven, scholars have had to explain away his sacred music as inconsequential and his religious beliefs as unorthodox or non-existent. They tie themselves up in knots trying to solve the problem, especially with regard to Beethoven’s magnum opus. Although there is nothing theologically unorthodox in the Missa Solemnis, somehow the mass has to be theologically unorthodox for these commentators: at best it is a mass for deist, but it is mostly a mass about humanity. The liturgical bits can be dismissed, they claim, as something that stifles what is truly Beethovenian; instead, to grasp its meaning, you have to listen to the mass as if it where a symphony resonant with tones of human freedom and autonomy. It is almost as if Beethoven wrote the mass against his will. In one recent biography, the chapter on the Missa Solemnis opens with the incredulous question: “Why did Beethoven write a mass?” 

Why not? The problem is not Beethoven’s (obviously) but the biographer’s belief in a history that sits uncomfortably with the composer. Yes, Beethoven was a revolutionary in the times of revolution. Yes, he was born in the Age of Enlightenment, and even declared ‘freedom and progress’ as the main purpose of art. But that does not make him French; he did not step foot in France, and despite the Napoleonic aftermath of the French Revolution, what Enlightenment meant in Bonn where Beethoven was born and in Vienna where he died, could not be anticlerical or antimonarchist because these cities were under the rule of Enlightened despots who by definition had both kingly and ecclesiastic functions.  In other words, Beethoven was a child of a religious Enlightenment. This means that his innovative and radical works were not composed against the sacred but were inspired by it. This is not to say that there is no truth in a Promethean view of Beethoven or that there is no conflict in his music during this tumultuous period in Europe, but it does imply that Beethoven upheld sacred music. In fact, he leads it in a new direction. And, if we have ears to hear, then the Missa Solemnis can open up a new sound world full of theological resonance. 

While working on the Missa,  Beethoven wrote out the Latin text of the mass on a piece of paper and added a German translation next to each line. As a teenager, Beethoven regularly played the organ for mass in the court at Bonn; he knew the Catholic liturgy from memory. So why would he write out the text and its translation? Because he wanted to explore the meaning of each word more fully, looking up a German dictionary for definitions and synonyms that would enlarge his understanding of the text. And if the expression mark in the score of the Missa (‘with devotion’) and his collection of devotional literature in his library is anything to go by, this process was an act of meditation for the composer. This was no routine setting of the mass. In fact, if you listen carefully, not only did Beethoven look up individual words to amplify their meaning, it seems that he also looked up the biblical reference to set their meaning in context. 

Listen to the Sanctus: you will hear echoes of the biblical book of Isaiah, chapter six. Beethoven conjures up a temple trembling at its foundations as the angels sing ‘Holy, holy, holy’. Similarly, in the Benedictus, you will hear echoes of the Palm Sunday procession from the gospels. The music is a match in the form of a pastoral; it depicts Jesus arriving as a king but in the form a humble shepherd riding a donkey, as the crowds chant “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” There is no sense of Promethean triumph here, but the sound of meekness and majesty. 

We don’t need to tie ourselves up in knots to understand Beethoven or the Missa solemnis as secular. May be, to use the composer’s own words, Beethoven was just an ordinary Catholic writing extraordinary music to ‘instil religious affections’ in the congregants. This view would be a more faithful account of the composer’s life, but it would also radically change the way we understand Beethoven and the subsequent ‘progress’ of music history in our textbooks.  And this, perhaps, points to the most critical function of sacred music: to reveal the hearts of its hearers. The Missa solemnis, as Beethoven's greatest work, is a capstone which many have rejected as the cornerstone of his oeuvre. Try not to trip up on it. 

Listen to Beethoven's mass

Review
Books
Culture
Wildness
6 min read

My open letter to Sally Rooney: dilatasti cor meum

You enlarge my heart.
A book cover depicts a yellow and white chessboard with pieces casting shadows of people.

This is silly, I realize. You’ll never see this. But I’ve just finished Intermezzo and I’m not sure what else to do with the bright sadness upon finishing it.

I can’t imagine I am your anticipated reader. I have children your age, for heaven’s sake. You write from, and about, worlds that are, in some ways, a foreign country for me. Sometimes I read your novels like Lévi-Strauss’s field notes from his years with the Nambikwara, describing the practices and rituals and mores of some foreign tribe—except that tribe includes my own children and the students I encounter everyday. Sometimes this makes me feel very old, and tired, and a little bit sad. Not in a judgmental way. I can’t imagine how hard it is to be 23 years old today. I feel badly about the world we’ve bequeathed to the twenty- and thirtysomethings that populate your novels. Your novels give me a glimpse into how they experience it. Which is what I love about the best fiction—the way it is a technology of mindreading, teleporting us into another’s perspective.

I don’t know, maybe it’s weird and kinda creepy that an old man like me gobbles up a novel like Intermezzo. Like a kind of voyeurism. I hope not. Because, in the end, what you achieve is at once the construction and revelation of a human world. And as Terence said, nothing human is alien to me.

This will sound crazy, but from the very first pages of Intermezzo I found myself reading with a strange sort of ache in my heart. Not a pain as much as a held-breath sense of ekstasis, of being stretched and pulled out of myself. I think now I’d say I was responding to what I can only describe as the tenderness you show your characters. I don’t mean for a second that you shrink from portraying their brokenness, even their brutality at times. But only that as you track their mystery and monstrosity you situate all of it in their ineradicable humanity. And in contemporary fiction, that is rarer than some might think. It speaks to me of a fullness that characterizes the matrix of your imagination, from which these characters were born. You don’t let them escape judgment; but that judgment comes from their own social worlds, not the caustic condescension of you as the narrator. This is where your mastery of free indirect speech is so uncanny: you stay near your characters, you listen closely, but somehow in the alchemy of your prose even their own harsh self-judgment is portrayed with tenderness and understanding.

Honestly, it reminds me a lot of how the mystical tradition portrays God, that Creator of all creators, the Narrator who is in love with every feeble creature, every loathable antihero, which is to say every single one of us, protagonists in dramas we don’t realize. There’s this marvelous line in The Cloud of Unknowing where the medieval sage says, “It is not who you are or what you’ve been that God sees with his merciful eyes, but what you want to be.” This will make you cringe, but your narration echoes that. You see what Peter and Ivan want to be. And in so doing, you help me look at all the human beings around me with the same sort of eyes. Or at least I want to be that person.

OK, this is, like, crazy word association, but as I was reading Intermezzo a line of prayer kept coming to mind. You might know it. It’s from the Psalms. It’s part of Prime, the first hour of the Divine Office. St. Teresa of Ávila talks about it a lot. Dilatasti cor meumYou enlarge my heart. You dilate my heart. You widen the scope of what my heart can take in and absorb. This, in the end, is what Intermezzo does. For me, at least.

It’s funny, you know. I finished the second half of the novel while I was attending the annual conference of the Hegel Society. (I thought you’d get a chuckle out of that.) So in the margins of Intermezzo I have scribbled notes like: Recognition! Master/slave dialectic!3 But it’s really not so crazy, is it, because, like Hegel, you seem to intuit how much we long to be seen, to be recognized, and why that means passing through the crucible of forgiveness to achieve reconciliation. This is why I think you are attuned to a below-the-surface rumbling in your generation that, against all the forces of capital and Distraction, Inc. and just the bullshit of consumer nihilism, can’t quite shake a yearning, or at least a wondering, if there’s something more—something like “meaning” or significance we could feel pulled into. I love it that, in Intermezzo, this culminates in a vision of community. (I’m trying not to spoil anything here, since, ahem, my wife hasn’t been able to finish the book yet.) Being known, being seen, being forgiven, being loved. Belonging.

My aforementioned (long suffering, forgiving) wife loves a song by the Highwomen called “Crowded Table.” She plays it full blast in our kitchen when she’s preparing for dinners when she gathers beloveds near. “I want a house with a crowded table / and a place by the fire for everyone.” I thought of the bridge of the song at the end of Intermezzo.

Everyone’s a little broken
And everyone belongs.

I finished your book on a packed train from Boston to Philadelphia and decided not to be embarrassed that I was weeping. The older I get, the more paternal I become, I’m realizing. I don’t think that’s an expression of control or “paternalism” in the negative sense. At least I hope not. It’s more that the older our kids get, more of the world is filled with people who look like the children I love. I don’t mean that I infantilize them, either. I treasure the adults they’ve become.

I’m not describing this very well. What I’m trying to say is, I am just an inveterate dad. I can’t help it. So as much as I read your novel as a scholar or a philosopher or a fellow human, I couldn’t help reading it as a dad. And when I spent time with Peter and Ivan and Sylvia and Naomi, I just wanted for them what I want for my own children and their spouses—for them to know they are loved and held dear and for them to find their people. It’s silly and sappy, but I wanted to talk to Ivan and Peter and tell them: It’s possible. There is still love in the world. Even more incredibly: there is forgiveness. Intermezzo has the audacity to not only hope this but to portray it. I know it costs you something to do so in a literary world that prizes cynicism and distance.

Maybe I wept at the end of Intermezzo because it was as much a mirror as an icon. Despite the generational gap, you gave me occasion to see my own life reflected back to me. In the mirror is an us (“The that is we and the we that is I,” as Hegel put it). I look in the mirror of longing & hope that is your novel, and looking back I see my wife, Deanna, who has been forgiving me for over 35 years, letting me know I am beloved. And we’re surrounded by our children, the overflowing of our own love, these children who have become such dear friends, who have forgiven me more times than I can count. And in that mirror their spouses are alongside them, our dream come true—the beloveds they have found who forgive them and welcome them home over and over again. It’s a crowded table. And there’s always more room. Everybody’s a little broken, and everybody belongs.

I guess what I want to say is: I admire your courage to write a novel that tells the truth—that love gets the last word because it is the first word that speaks us all into being, the origin of the world.

Gratefully,

A reader

 

This article first appeared as a post on James K.A. Smith's Quid Amo Substack. Reproduced by kind permission.