A Catholic Beethoven?
In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor describes the emergence of “subtler languages” in the nineteenth century—Romantic and Victorian poetry, for instance—that allow the poet to keep his opinions about God, Christianity, and metaphysics private or occluded from public view. These subtler languages “permit a kind of suspension or indeterminacy of ontological commitments.” Does God exist? Ought I to have a personal relationship with him? Does he have a son named Jesus who accomplished miracles? These are questions that poets, artists, and composers can temporarily “suspend.” Taylor describes three sorts of approaches to religion in the nineteenth century: one, to opt straightforwardly for an entirely immanent cosmos; two, to opt straightforwardly for religion, in defiance of the “impersonal order;” or three, to “remain with the indeterminacy.”
Nicholas Chong in his recent book, The Catholic Beethoven, has moved Ludwig van Beethoven convincingly out of the first category. Beethoven was decidedly not a composer of the anti-religious Enlightenment, proclaiming the advent of a new cult of reason over religion. But whether Beethoven moves fully into the second category above, or whether there remains some indeterminacy, is a more difficult question, one that Chong himself sensitively and carefully probes through the pages of his book.
On one hand, why hasn’t Beethoven been proclaimed a Catholic long before this? That the great symphonist should have proclaimed on multiple occasions that his greatest work was his Missa Solemnis should be sufficient reason to make us wonder. Certain works that he considered important, and that had significant reception in his own time and shortly after his death, are the ones concertgoers are unlikely to encounter—Christus am Ölberge, the Gellert Lieder, or the Mass in C. Yet through their text and music, Chong reveals to us the inner profile of a composer who had personal and often powerful responses to the story of Christ and to the Catholic liturgy. “Should I hate my brothers,” in the lyrics of one of Beethoven’s Gellert Lieder, “Whom God has through the blood of his Son / Purchased at so high a price?” These sorts of texts, Chong notes, were chosen by Beethoven not at the behest of a patron or a commission but were born purely out of Beethoven’s own desire to be the composer of Christian and Catholic music.
Chong does not dispute that Beethoven is an Enlightenment figure but explores what sort of Enlightenment Beethoven was a part of in Bonn and Vienna, building on the notion of David Sorkin’s “Enlightenment spectrum.” Chong demonstrates, based on the evidence in Beethoven’s letters, diaries, annotations, library, and especially his music, that the composer was primarily influenced by the Catholic Enlightenment propagated by the Habsburg emperor Joseph II. Granted, Beethoven’s Catholicism is not the sort that would be likely to get him invited onto Marcus Grodi’s “Journey Home.” Yet it is a real Catholicism that motivates a significant portion of the composer’s output and provides the listener new ways of hearing Beethoven’s work.
Scholars have previously tended to portray Beethoven as a secularized or nominal Catholic, and not entirely without reason. It’s difficult to shake the feeling that the Ninth Symphony is a hymn-like panegyric to the deistic worldview: nameless creator, brotherhood of man, fields of Elysium. He was famously fascinated by world religions, copying a variety of non-Christian religious teachings into his commonplace book. He once signed a letter, “Yours in Christ and Apollo, Beethoven,” perfectly illustrating Taylor’s point about “indeterminacy.” And he certainly had a habit in his letters of making sarcastic comments about some of the Catholic clergy of his milieu—but then again, I suppose, few things more unerringly betray a Catholic than just such a habit.
Indeed, the religion from which Beethoven is often supposed to have distanced himself is frequently left unexamined. It turns out to be a complicated affair. Chong admirably maps out the irreducible nuances of the Catholic theology of Beethoven’s time. That theology was often suspicious of papal power, of ritual mystery, of clericalism, while at the same time embracing a kind of moralism, a pietism, highly personal and sentimentalized portrayals of Christ, Jansenism, lay participation in the liturgy, and ecumenism with Lutherans and Calvinists. Not all of these things worked well together, and one often sees in The Catholic Beethoven the uneasy bedfellows that any Catholic in Enlightenment Bonn or Vienna was forced to keep. Yet this is precisely the sort of complicated landscape Beethoven scholars must be able to navigate in order to understand the composer’s sacred output and its ambivalences. Chong’s book will be a resource to musicologists and other scholars in making legible the complexities of that theological milieu.
Chong’s musical analysis provides the positive case that the other evidence leaves more ambiguous. Beethoven’s sacred music paints not so much the text of the liturgy as the believer’s subjective reaction to it. Chong hears in the orchestra the portrayal of a pious emotional response to the glories of the Credo, or the sense of wonder at the host’s elevation in the Sanctus. The theology of Johann Michael Sailer, whom Beethoven greatly admired, looms large here. Sailer, in Chong’s telling, sought to combine the more subjective and ecumenical impulses of Catholic Enlightenment with a renewed appreciation of Catholic liturgy in line with the nascent Catholic Restoration. Chong spends, perhaps, more time than he needs attempting to establish a particular connection between Beethoven and Sailer. Merely the two in apposition make a natural and productive comparison, especially in interpreting Missa Solemnis. Sailer, in Chong’s book, comes to occupy something like the role E. T. A. Hoffman traditionally has in Beethoven studies, that of the exegete of Beethoven’s metaphysical significance. Sailer as exegete, however, seems to capture a side of Beethoven less often seen by scholars and critics.
Chong’s book may not be easily accessible to those unfamiliar with the basic outlines of Beethoven’s career. Readers are only briefly situated, if at all, in the context of what are well-known touchpoints in Beethoven scholarship—the Heiligenstadt Testament, for instance, or the geographical movements of the composer. It will take an enterprising reader, or one with previous knowledge of Beethoven scholarship, to wade through the sources and the scores. It will be interesting to see what sorts of avenues Chong’s work opens for future analysis of Beethoven. He has created a “hermeneutical window,” to borrow musicologist Lawrence Kramer’s phrase, through which it is possible to see Beethoven’s Catholicism appearing not only in his sacred works but potentially in his secular work as well, as one would expect for any composer of deep faith.
Ultimately Beethoven still hovers, much of the time, on that tenuous boundary, that ambiguity that Charles Taylor sees as so characteristic of the nineteenth century in its attitude toward religion. Whether Beethoven ought to be understood as a Catholic composer is no longer the difficult question, but how and when he is Catholic in his music will, I suspect, frame many discussions to come.
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