MASS in D major (Missa Solemnis) Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827)

This Mass, begun as an occasional work for the enthronement of Beethoven’s friend, the Archduke Rudolph as Archbishop of Olmütz, was far from complete when this took place in March 1820. Beethoven had started work on the Kyrie at the end of 1818, but the Mass was not finished until four years later. It is important to remember that it was intended as a liturgical work; though its vastness of conception and dramatic power seem to belong to the nineteenth-century world of romantic-religious art. The Missa Solemnis everywhere shows Beethoven’s awareness of his text. Not trusting the remnants of his school Latin, he worked from a German ‘crib’, and we cannot hope to understand the music except in relation to the words, for this is no formal Mass in which the text is merely convenient material for vocalising. During those four years of Jacob-like wrestling, Beethoven strove to unite all the resources of music in a creative relationship with the central text of Latin Christianity. The symphonic orchestra, sonata form, fugue, the concerto, the choral style of Handel, the modal harmony of Palestrina – these elements were fusible only in a creative fire as intense as any artist has ever lived in and through.

In the sixteenth century, when the Mass provided a vehicle for the only type of large-scale composition, the problem of words and music scarcely existed. The ritual statement of the liturgy was prescribed and the emotional tone of the music was of no more consequence than the vocal quality of the celebrant. For Beethoven, the music had to illuminate the text while retaining its own coherence, yet much of this text offers no obvious solution, having neither human reference nor any trace of pictorial imagery.

Attempts have been made to interpret his Mass in terms of humanism, but we must face the truth that for this most religious of artists the idea of God was more real than anything in the phenomenal world. Contemplate the tragi-comedy of his life (‘Comoedia finita est’, he said at its end), and you are left finally with the awareness of courage, humility and compassion. As for faith, he was far from Bach’s serene certainty; the two greatest settings of the Mass could not be more unlike, for Bach’s masterpiece is everywhere undisturbed; Beethoven recognises with fear and trembling that salvation, which for him means peace, might just conceivably be attainable. He could have recognised the motto of his life in Goethe’s words from Faust (Part II):

‘Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen’ (Whoever continues to strive, him we can redeem).

Thus the sense of the human spirit stretched to the limit, which pervades the Mass, arises from Beethoven’s concept of the almost unbridgeable gulf between Divine perfection and man’s inadequacy.

Beethoven seems to interpret the Incarnation as the means of bridging this void; throughout the Mass all references to the Second Person have an especial intensity, while the Third Person is strangely neglected. The vast fugue which ends the Gloria is not on ‘Cum sancto spiritu in Gloria Dei Patris’, as had become traditional, but on the last four words of the phrase. In the Credo, the phrase ‘Et in Spiritum Sanctum, is passed over in a way almost perfunctory, in contrast with Bach’s long aria, whereas ‘Et homo factus est’ inspires Beethoven to passages of Fidelio-like depth.

For Bach the theologian, Baptism is a central dogma to be emphasised in a whole chorus, whereas Beethoven is content to mention this essential (to the orthodox) condition of salvation in passing, hidden beneath repetitions of the word ‘Credo’. Such contrasts could be multiplied; their relevance is that the structure of Beethoven’s composition has its source in his personal interpretation of his text, though to say this is far from saying that the Mass is an expression of personal feeling. Not long after he had completed the Ninth Symphony, Beethoven wrote to the publishers Schott at Mainz of ‘a new large solemn Mass . . . hard though it is to speak of myself, nevertheless I regard this as my greatest work’.

BASIL LAM.