Ludwig van Beethoven

In a letter dating from around the time he began sketching the Missa solemnis, Beethoven spoke of how satisfying it would be to work as Kapellmeister of a small court or chapel. No doubt he was already dreaming of serving his friend and patron, Archduke Rudolf, in that capacity. Rudolf’s elevation to the post of Archbishop of Olmutz was imminent, and Beethoven hoped to have the great Mass performed in his honor as part of the installation ceremony, and then, presumably, to be appointed his chapel master. Posterity must be thankful that Beethoven’s ambitions were thwarted. Leaving aside his profound deafness, which would have compromised his ability to fulfill some of the Kapellmeister’s traditional functions, Beethoven was temperamentally unsuited to the job. An acknowledged genius during his own lifetime—indeed probably the first such acknowledged genius in western musical history—Beethoven was nonetheless incapable of making the compromises necessary for disciplined work in a hierarchical organization. His musical ideas developed slowly and incrementally; he found it virtually impossible to meet deadlines, either external or self-imposed. The Missa solemnis, in fact, was not completed until 1823, three years after Rudolf’s installation, though it had consumed most of the composer’s creative energy since 1818. Even had his temperament and way of working not been so problematic, Beethoven’s ideas about music, religion, and society would have made his work ill-suited to liturgical use in either Catholic or Protestant churches of the time.

What Beethoven, ironically, did share with his forebears in the German Kapellmeister tradition was prowess at the keyboard, though in his case it was not as an organist performing sacred works, but as a pianist performing secular ones. His reputation as a performer preceded recognition as a composer, and while even in this realm he was not precocious, manifestations of his genius were already evident in his early piano playing. Mozart, for whom Beethoven played on his first trip to Vienna in 1787, was lukewarm in his evaluation of the young pianist, except, significantly, as an improviser. When Beethoven next returned to Vienna in the early 1790s, he quickly established himself as the leading pianist in what was then Europe’s foremost musical center. And as a pianist, improvisation was both one of his legendary skills and also undoubtedly an important means of accessing his creative muse.

The piano concerto “number 2” in B flat dates from this first phase in Beethoven’s career. Though it was not published until 1801 (after the so-called “first” piano concerto in C), it is in fact the earlier of the two works and the composer’s oldest surviving concerto (fragments exist of an unpublished violin concerto in C and a piano concerto in E flat dating from about 1784). Beethoven began sketching the B flat concerto in 1791 or ’92 and finished it just in time for its premiere on March 29, 1795, at which he probably improvised the cadenza. He continued to revise the concerto during the six years between that first perforrnance and its publication, and the cadenza heard this evening he actually wrote and appended some 14 years after that. The fact that Beethoven kept tinkering with the work suggests that he was not altogether happy with it. Indeed he characterized it in the cover letter he sent with the manuscript to his publisher as “not one of my best.” To the modern listener, such an apology seems incredible. This is in no sense an inferior piece of music. A compact, charming work of prevailing good mood, it follows very much in the late Viennese Classical tradition of Mozart and Haydn and succeeds brilliantly by those standards. Whatever shortcomings it had for the composer probably related to his growing dissatisfaction with the Classical style itself. By this point, Beethoven was already searching for a new idiom that would break free of the Classicism’s idealizations of sweetness and light, balance and formal perfection, a musical language adequate to expressing the new era’s aspirations for individual freedom and a powerful, direct relation to Nature and Spirit—an idiom, in other words, that would redefine what a concerto was expected to be. It was a goal he more nearly approached in the C major concerto and fully achieved only in the third concerto in c minor, written the same year the B flat concerto was published.

A comparable struggle is evident in the genesis of the Missa solemnis, though by the hme he finally undertook it, Beethoven was firmly on the other side of the great divide, a mature composer fully committed to the Romantic world view and confident of his own revolutionary voice within that world. The relative lateness of the Missa is noteworthy. Beethoven’s output of sacred music was remarkably small. His first major sacred work, the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives, from which the Hallelujah chorus that opens our program comes, dates from 1803-4; it was followed a few years later by a Mass in C. Though both compositions are umnistakably Beethoven, neither embodies the revolutionary character of the piano or symphonic music he was composing during this same period; nor can either be said to prefigure the Missa solemnis in the same way that the Choral Fantasy, for instance, prefigures the Ninth Symphony. It is as though in these first (one can hardly say "early") works, he was still uncertain as to how to handle sacred subject matter and so tended to fall back upon the examples of his predecessors, especially Haydn. Given his apparent dissatisfaction with those models, it is not surprising that Beethoven waited over a decade before he again approached a sacred work of such magnitude.

From the outset of his work on the Missa Beethoven seems to have been obsessed with getting it “right” in an entirely new way. He sent his friends to comb the libraries for sacred music of all eras and studied virtually the entire available history of sacred composition from Gregorian chant through the Masses and oratorios of Bach and Handel. He concluded that the old church modes (both in their original form in medieval plainsong and as used in the High Renaissance polyphony of Palestrina et al.) were the best means of expressing sacred texts; yet except for a few isolated passages in the Missa (e.g., Et incarnatus est or the opening of the Et resurrexit) where he uses the old style for dramatic effect, he adhered to the symphonic/sonata style with which he was most comfortable. This enabled him to apply stylistic features of the sonata form, such as the development and recapitulation of thematic material—even of text at the conclusion of the Gloria—in ways never before used with regard to the Mass text.

For Beethoven, “getting it right” also involved a personal reckoning with his own idiosyncradc and complex religious beliefs, a process which may have been equally responsible for the Mass’s long gestation as well as its palpable sense of struggle and stylistic eclecticism. Though he was undeniably a Roman Catholic and believed the basic theological tenets of his church, Beethoven was also notoriously anti-authoritarian, as much with regard to religious as to civil hierarchy. Like many heirs of the European Enlightenment, including Mozart, Haydn, and Gluck, he was attracted to the counterbalancing ideals of Freemasonry, which stressed a spiritual brotherhood cutting across traditional religious and social boundaries. Some critics have noted a current of Masonic symbols in the Missa, particularly in the “Kyrie,” which at hmes seems to evoke the Masonic virtues of humanity, wisdom, and honesty. Another crucial component of Beethoven’s spirituality was German Romanbcism as embodied in the poetry of Goethe and Schiller, the writings of Herder, with their nohons of a myshcal relation between people and Nature, and most importantly in Hegel’s philosophy of spirit. As Beethoven understood Hegel’s posihon, not only was the true nature of God, or the great World Spirit, ultimately unknowable by the finite human mind; the Spirit itself could only achieve self-knowledge through engagement with its opposite, a Fall into the world. Such ideas undoubtedly colored Beethoven’s understanding of the mysteries of incarnation, death and resurrechon, indeed of the whole Chrishan Mass. It might be said that where the great B Minor Mass of Bach was conceived to be a revelation of the Word, Beethoven’s Missa represented an epic human struggle to understand it. It may have the very ineffability of the God that inspired him to create a Mass of “ideal” music almost beyond the capabilides of contemporary musicians: a work at once so sublime and of excruciahng difficulty for its performers that it made them directly experience the struggle to know God.

The musical symbolism of the Missa is complex, personal, and controversial. It would be foolish to attempt further “explanahon” a work some authors have characterized as profoundly Catholic, others as vehemently anh-ecclesiashcal; some as deeply humanist, others as showing man’s uldmate fallibility. What can be said with certainty is that Beethoven intended it for the whole of humanity; he described the Missa as a kind of sacred symphony or oratorio and expressed satisfachon that its first public performance had been given in a public concert hall rather than a church. He offered, moreover, to write a German language version to make it more accessible in Protestant communities. Beethoven said plainly that his purpose in writing the Missa was to induce religious feelings in both performers and audiences. Given his understanding of faith as an individual act achieved through a kind of Faustian struggle, it is probably best to allow each listener to engage the music on its own terms and experience that struggle at a personal level.