Beethoven's Missa Solemnis
Islamizing terrorists (many people would be rightly annoyed if I called them simply "Islamic", with the suggestion that they represent the Umma) may have murdered thousands of people, thrown countries into confusion, terrorized and butchered little children, but one has to say one thing for them: they are a dream come true for TV executives. In the last couple of months, British mainstream TV has broadcast, I think, at least four major prime-time programs featuring terrorist outrages in London, including a game show in which contestants had to show how they would run the country during a catastrophe. Scaremongering, much?
By contrast, the intelligent and lengthy responses I received to my item about an age of thieves demand a properly thought-out and decently-worked reply. I will see what I can do in the next few days.
Today I enclose an essay about Beethoven's Missa Solemnis which I wrote a few years ago.
...the point is that Beethoven was doing something completely new. He had already written a Mass, a beautiful work, but cast in traditional forms; now, for the first time, he made a complete, through-composed symphonic structure for each movement. This was actually not possible before him, since it was he who had perfected large-scale symphonic composition. Even so, it took him two exhausting years to write, for nobody had ever done something remotely like this, and he had to work out the implications of his new musical forms. The peculiarities of the Solemn Mass depend on the fact that he had not only applied them, but completely altered his approach to the text - indeed, to text in general - because he had fully understood the potential of the new form as vehicles for expression.
Previous Mass settings, like operas, had been composed in "numbers", making each verse or group of verses an autonomous little piece. Some, like Beethoven's own first one, omitted the first verse altogether, leaving it to the officiating priest to chant; in others, like Haydn's, Bach's and Mozart's, the word Credo - "I believe" - had no special emphasis, since the logic of composing the Mass verse by verse bracketed it with the rest of the first verse: Credo in unum Deum, I believe in one God. But under the new principle, opening words acquire great significance: as the opening of the Fifth Symphony - or even more of the Ninth - starts a vast single musical argument that conditions and dominates it to the very last chord, so too in the Creed the one statement, I believe, I believe, dominates the whole from beginning to end.
Nobody before Beethoven had given so much emphasis to the single opening word, and this meant that he could correspondingly reduce the emphasis on the unsympathetic bits. If he didn't find the thought of the Church, or even of the Holy Ghost, as emotionally significant as those of Creation, Incarnation, or Crucifixion-Death-Resurrection, it is not that he rejected those dogmas; rather, he concentrated on what he found central. He might have found it a bit of a wasted effort - and worse, a mistake in the relative value of statements - to give as much space and strength to et in unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam Ecclesiam as to et homo factus est or Deum de Deo,lumen de lumine, Deum verum de Deo vero; but what he did not do, unlike for instance Brahms, was to pick his own texts to write a Deutsches Requiem that deliberately excludes fundamental dogmas, leaving Brahms in the position, not of a Christian artist, but of founder and sole member of the religion of Brahmsianity. The verses he did not himself find emotionally involving - the Holy Ghost, the Church, Baptism - he set to a fast fugue that is almost a dance, but as fiery as war music, rhythmed with battle-cries of Credo! Credo! He made it as clear as he, as a musician, could, that he took every detail, whether it engaged his emotions or not, as a matter of trust and belief: Credo! Credo! This, and all of this, is what I, Ludwig van Beethoven, believe; from the beginning to the end, this is my Creed. And it is the Catholic Creed. And to make it doubly and trebly clear, he brought back, not only the opening musical theme, but even the word, so that nobody should be in any doubt of what he meant: I believe! I believe! Beethoven was a great one for making his meaning absolutely clear.
That he took it passionately is obvious to anyone who knows how to hear music. The Credo theme is militant, thundering out the truth of all its avowals with trumpet blast and massed choir, throwing its joyous defiance of doubt to the very heavens. A modern spirit might find this music's vigour a bit dubious, as if the artist were trying to shout any objection down; quiet faith seems far more credible today than thundering defiance. But I'm not so sure the great man did not find something in Christianity that is truly there from the start and that is missed at the soul's danger. There can be no such thing as totally safe belief, because belief is the act of overcoming doubt. It assumes doubt. Therefore faith is not only quietly and silently confident; it is that too, and that too is there to be found in the lovely peace of Beethoven's slow movements; but it's also, and at the same time, an act of will, a motion of the soul against emptiness and doubt, a gauntlet thrown at the world and at every power in the world that would shake us from where we are. And of the two aspects of faith, comfort and defiance, this is the most significant, since destructive doubt is comfortable too; more comfortable, in fact, than faith, because it makes no demands.
And in Beethoven's life, of all lives, faith had to mean just this. It was a strange life, in which "triumph and disaster" were present in equally great proportions, and both equally the result of the kind of man he was. The young Rossini, cynic though he was, was so shaken by the aging Titan's living conditions that he invited Viennese musicians to get together some funds to get him decent housing; he was answered that "he would sell everything and find a way to get himself into squalor again". Absolutely true. Beethoven was that kind of man. And yet, at the same time, this self-destructive personality was a self-made man everything in whose life was the result of his own labour; who, starting as the exploited child of a drunkard, afflicted by congenital disease, in almost constant pain from the age of 17 to the day of his death, and as if that wasn't enough swiftly going deaf even as a young man (another great musician, Janacek, suffered from deafness, but only in his old age), became, against the grain of the period, the acknowledged Greatest Living Musician, the biggest single man in his field and one of the most famous people in Europe. There was that in him which absolutely defied ruin.
You can hear it in one of his last works, the Quartet op.131; a piece, written by a man already on his last legs, that sounds almost like a voice from another planet, the voice of a man who in less than fifty-five years had lost so much and seen so much fade away that he was almost a stranger to himself. But when six movements of variation on grief and loss have gone by, there is something so strange, so moving, so entirely beautiful, as to be pretty nearly my favourite thing in music: a little dry marching tune that, without any theatrical assertion, without need for any further statement, with no more than its own child-like stride, both strong and simple, just marches on. In all of music there is nothing like it: it speaks of a courage that cannot be broken, not because it has any cause to fight for or any reward to win in this life, but just because this is the way the man is. However many killing griefs the man may have suffered, however many times he may have felt broken, at the end of the day he just cannot be: his soul does go marching on. It is a forlorn little thing, this march, wholly brave and beautiful - a Silver Angel march. This is, at last, what all his great, defiant gestures ever meant; a human force that, however beaten down by the powers of destruction without and within, however threatened with despair, however lost and lonely and impoverished, was ultimately incapable of being broken - except (who knows?) perhaps by death.
And when, in the Creed, he employs the same magnificent defiance in his statement of faith, it is because that faith is not an anchor or a crutch, an outside support to cling to when the inner man despairs, but part of, even the same as, this undefeated Man. It is despair that is outside the gates, knocking to be let in; and it is the Man himself, from inside (however these metaphors for mental realities which all exist inside a man's psyche may be understood) who is, in his own identity, the faith that answers and defies.
It is therefore a lot less important to trace which dogmas engaged the great man's imagination little or not at all, and so might, had he in fact rejected them, have made him a heretic. The point is that he did not reject them: he went through the list of them, delivering at each verse a trumpet-voiced assurance that, yes, he did believe: Credo! Credo! If he did not personally see how they fitted in, or if he could not think that they deserved in his music the same space he gave to the birth of God the Son from God the Father (Deum de Deo, Lumen de Lumine, Deum verum de Deo vero - in which an unbelievably brilliant series of echo effects gives the very sense of the birth of God from God in a way you could hardly imagine any mortal creature could envisage, let alone render), of His incarnation, His death, His burial, His resurrection, and His everlasting reign, and later in the Benedictus at once of His ride into Jerusalem on a donkey and His constantly repeated incarnation in the transubstantiated Host; if one way or another Beethoven could not give the same attention to Holy Ghost, Church and baptism as he gave to Father, Son, resurrection, and eternal life (his music for which closes the Creed with enormous power) he took them on trust as part of the Catholic faith on which his being rested, and gave them out with the same assurance, if not the same extent, as the other dogmas of the Nicene Creed.
Nothing could be more Catholic than this. The basic difference between Catholic and Protestant is not doctrinal, since there is no such thing as Protestant doctrine, and it is very hard to find one single idea that has not at some point been upheld by some Protestant body. It is that between trust and arrogance; Catholics don't place their own wee individual experience at the centre of the universe. Their faith is not "blind", since it does rest on individual experience of God, but it does not limit itself to individual and possibly delusive feelings: it accepts as reliable the long tradition of other men and women who adhered to the same truths. A Catholic may not feel the same enthusiasm for all the Church's doctrines, but he will not draw the Protestant and wholly senseless conclusion that because they mean nothing to him, therefore they are impious and unChristian.
This is exactly Beethoven's attitude in the Missa Solemnis. He does not give the same weight to every statement in the Latin Mass; some parts of the Creed (the Spirit speaking through the Prophets, and the Church itself) he gives little space to, passing them over with a firm but curt Credo! Credo! - I believe! I believe! He does not deny their validity, but he has nothing personal to say about them as he has for Father, Son, Creation, Incarnation, Death, Resurrection, Judgement, and Life Eternal. Indeed, I would say that Brahms in the Deutsches Requiem was less an artist (though still very great) than old Ludwig of Bonn whom he worshipped, just to the extent to which he approached his material with the very Protestant but not very Christian idea of selecting a group of Bible texts that made sense to him. I'm afraid that makes it far too easy, and to that extent inartistic: artists are not supposed to smooth over difficulties and to produce what is pleasing to them only, but to deal with things as they are.
But the most incontrovertible proof of Beethoven's Catholicism is in the Benedictus, which he designed to overrun its proper place in the Mass and cover the Consecration of the Host. How, then, does Beethoven describe the Consecration? Let's pay attention. The symphonic movement opens with a brooding, low-voiced weave of notes, echoed on instrument after instrument, with the four parts of the choir each repeating the words Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus in the lowest register it can reach. There is something inexpressibly mournful and Earth-bound about this sound, as though the corporeal universe lamented its own dull, heavy materiality; and this lament takes the shape of a brooding on the holiness of God - Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus. Under it all there is a slow but steady beat, rather like a funeral march - and yet not so much like a funeral as like a relentless trudge; the rhythm, one might say, of matter without spirit, of an ever-rolling, dark universe.
The music grows tense and expectant, nervously repeating the words Dominus, Dominus Deus Sabaoth - Lord, Lord God of Hosts; and suddenly this nervous expectation is answered by a wild, uncontrollable burst of sheer force. Pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria tua; Hosanna in excelsis! As suddenly as this tremendous manifestation of God's power has appeared, it vanishes, returning the music to its low, brooding tone - expression of matter alone, desolate, deprived of Spirit. All that has happened so far is that the power of God and the helplessness of matter have been unforgettably contrasted.
And then something miraculous happens: just when the slow circle of brooding music has reached its lowest point - and its natural termination - it is answered by a single, soaring violin like a light in the sky. Suddenly our eyes are lifted from the darkness of material existence, and the music finds its voice again. Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini: blessed is He Who comes in the name of the Lord. The total dichotomy between Divine power and material helplessness is overcome; something has come through, not to challenge with trumpet and shout, but to enter, with the same tune and the same song, the music of material life. Something has come in the name of the Lord, and He is blessed.
The slow beat that had underlain the brooding music now comes into its own as the slow march on whose step instruments and voices pass to each other the tune of material existence, soaring, growing, rising. Certainly Beethoven is thinking of Jesus' entrance into Jerusalem, when the crowd blessed the One Who came in the name of the Lord; but his thought is not simply of triumph. The march is at once triumphant and tragic, bearing in itself triumph, death, and resurrection - at its end is not just the Temple, but Golgotha; and not just Golgotha, but the open grave and the rolled stone.
And yet there is more to it than just a historical picture. The course of the music is not pictorial, save in the grandest and most basic way possible. That darkness from which it rises, that darkness from which the Spirit - depicted by the violin - lifts it by a sort of musical miracle, until the choir can join together to hail the miracle, Hosanna in excelsis - that darkness is the darkness of matter; and what happens to it is Transubstantiation. The movement closes with the whole orchestra and choir soaring on quite another level from that on which they had opened; the music is the same, but there is no going back to the darkness of the opening. By the miraculous intervention of the Spirit, beginning from the moment where the whole music seemed to have to end, it has changed its nature from darkness to light. Please notice that Beethoven had allowed every propulsive force he could find in his chord sequence to exhaust itself before he brought in his violin miracle; there was nothing left for it to say until He who comes in the name of the Lord changed its nature, not by a furious outburst of power (we had already had that) but by entering and changing it.
This is Transubstantiation pure and simple, the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist against which almost every Protestant rebelled. Not that the Protestant doctrine - the Eucharist as pregnant memory of Jesus - is denied; as I pointed out, the historical memory is there firm and clear. But it is integrated into a greater whole. Beethoven could never in a million years have composed this piece without the spiritual heritage of seventeen Catholic centuries behind him. You cannot separate the music from its theological content; the great genius bent every resource of skill he had to express a concept that was the very reverse of vague. This is the Catholic faith in music; anyone who says otherwise doesn't know how to listen.
(Incidentally, a recent discovery that throws a very positive light on Beethoven was made by the great Beethoven scholar Maynard Solomon. He proved conclusively that the "immortal beloved" of Beethoven's famous letter was Antonie Brentano, the wife of a friend of his. The story Solomon has discovered reflects finely on everybody concerned: Antonie Brentano was a woman of exceptional culture and nobility of character, who became a sort of patron saint to the whole city of Frankfurt later in life and whose account of her care for a mentally sick daughter is a story of unselfconscious heroism. Beethoven loved the right woman in her. He also behaved, for a man with a reputation for selfish caprice, extremely well: in spite being in love to an extreme degree, he refused to come between Antonie and her husband, who was a dear friend of his; and both of them - though what they knew or did not know was never revealed - remained his friends and supporters, even after moving away from Vienna. It is a story full of nobility and heartbreak, worthy of Beethoven's own music.)
By contrast, the intelligent and lengthy responses I received to my item about an age of thieves demand a properly thought-out and decently-worked reply. I will see what I can do in the next few days.
Today I enclose an essay about Beethoven's Missa Solemnis which I wrote a few years ago.
...the point is that Beethoven was doing something completely new. He had already written a Mass, a beautiful work, but cast in traditional forms; now, for the first time, he made a complete, through-composed symphonic structure for each movement. This was actually not possible before him, since it was he who had perfected large-scale symphonic composition. Even so, it took him two exhausting years to write, for nobody had ever done something remotely like this, and he had to work out the implications of his new musical forms. The peculiarities of the Solemn Mass depend on the fact that he had not only applied them, but completely altered his approach to the text - indeed, to text in general - because he had fully understood the potential of the new form as vehicles for expression.
Previous Mass settings, like operas, had been composed in "numbers", making each verse or group of verses an autonomous little piece. Some, like Beethoven's own first one, omitted the first verse altogether, leaving it to the officiating priest to chant; in others, like Haydn's, Bach's and Mozart's, the word Credo - "I believe" - had no special emphasis, since the logic of composing the Mass verse by verse bracketed it with the rest of the first verse: Credo in unum Deum, I believe in one God. But under the new principle, opening words acquire great significance: as the opening of the Fifth Symphony - or even more of the Ninth - starts a vast single musical argument that conditions and dominates it to the very last chord, so too in the Creed the one statement, I believe, I believe, dominates the whole from beginning to end.
Nobody before Beethoven had given so much emphasis to the single opening word, and this meant that he could correspondingly reduce the emphasis on the unsympathetic bits. If he didn't find the thought of the Church, or even of the Holy Ghost, as emotionally significant as those of Creation, Incarnation, or Crucifixion-Death-Resurrection, it is not that he rejected those dogmas; rather, he concentrated on what he found central. He might have found it a bit of a wasted effort - and worse, a mistake in the relative value of statements - to give as much space and strength to et in unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam Ecclesiam as to et homo factus est or Deum de Deo,lumen de lumine, Deum verum de Deo vero; but what he did not do, unlike for instance Brahms, was to pick his own texts to write a Deutsches Requiem that deliberately excludes fundamental dogmas, leaving Brahms in the position, not of a Christian artist, but of founder and sole member of the religion of Brahmsianity. The verses he did not himself find emotionally involving - the Holy Ghost, the Church, Baptism - he set to a fast fugue that is almost a dance, but as fiery as war music, rhythmed with battle-cries of Credo! Credo! He made it as clear as he, as a musician, could, that he took every detail, whether it engaged his emotions or not, as a matter of trust and belief: Credo! Credo! This, and all of this, is what I, Ludwig van Beethoven, believe; from the beginning to the end, this is my Creed. And it is the Catholic Creed. And to make it doubly and trebly clear, he brought back, not only the opening musical theme, but even the word, so that nobody should be in any doubt of what he meant: I believe! I believe! Beethoven was a great one for making his meaning absolutely clear.
That he took it passionately is obvious to anyone who knows how to hear music. The Credo theme is militant, thundering out the truth of all its avowals with trumpet blast and massed choir, throwing its joyous defiance of doubt to the very heavens. A modern spirit might find this music's vigour a bit dubious, as if the artist were trying to shout any objection down; quiet faith seems far more credible today than thundering defiance. But I'm not so sure the great man did not find something in Christianity that is truly there from the start and that is missed at the soul's danger. There can be no such thing as totally safe belief, because belief is the act of overcoming doubt. It assumes doubt. Therefore faith is not only quietly and silently confident; it is that too, and that too is there to be found in the lovely peace of Beethoven's slow movements; but it's also, and at the same time, an act of will, a motion of the soul against emptiness and doubt, a gauntlet thrown at the world and at every power in the world that would shake us from where we are. And of the two aspects of faith, comfort and defiance, this is the most significant, since destructive doubt is comfortable too; more comfortable, in fact, than faith, because it makes no demands.
And in Beethoven's life, of all lives, faith had to mean just this. It was a strange life, in which "triumph and disaster" were present in equally great proportions, and both equally the result of the kind of man he was. The young Rossini, cynic though he was, was so shaken by the aging Titan's living conditions that he invited Viennese musicians to get together some funds to get him decent housing; he was answered that "he would sell everything and find a way to get himself into squalor again". Absolutely true. Beethoven was that kind of man. And yet, at the same time, this self-destructive personality was a self-made man everything in whose life was the result of his own labour; who, starting as the exploited child of a drunkard, afflicted by congenital disease, in almost constant pain from the age of 17 to the day of his death, and as if that wasn't enough swiftly going deaf even as a young man (another great musician, Janacek, suffered from deafness, but only in his old age), became, against the grain of the period, the acknowledged Greatest Living Musician, the biggest single man in his field and one of the most famous people in Europe. There was that in him which absolutely defied ruin.
You can hear it in one of his last works, the Quartet op.131; a piece, written by a man already on his last legs, that sounds almost like a voice from another planet, the voice of a man who in less than fifty-five years had lost so much and seen so much fade away that he was almost a stranger to himself. But when six movements of variation on grief and loss have gone by, there is something so strange, so moving, so entirely beautiful, as to be pretty nearly my favourite thing in music: a little dry marching tune that, without any theatrical assertion, without need for any further statement, with no more than its own child-like stride, both strong and simple, just marches on. In all of music there is nothing like it: it speaks of a courage that cannot be broken, not because it has any cause to fight for or any reward to win in this life, but just because this is the way the man is. However many killing griefs the man may have suffered, however many times he may have felt broken, at the end of the day he just cannot be: his soul does go marching on. It is a forlorn little thing, this march, wholly brave and beautiful - a Silver Angel march. This is, at last, what all his great, defiant gestures ever meant; a human force that, however beaten down by the powers of destruction without and within, however threatened with despair, however lost and lonely and impoverished, was ultimately incapable of being broken - except (who knows?) perhaps by death.
And when, in the Creed, he employs the same magnificent defiance in his statement of faith, it is because that faith is not an anchor or a crutch, an outside support to cling to when the inner man despairs, but part of, even the same as, this undefeated Man. It is despair that is outside the gates, knocking to be let in; and it is the Man himself, from inside (however these metaphors for mental realities which all exist inside a man's psyche may be understood) who is, in his own identity, the faith that answers and defies.
It is therefore a lot less important to trace which dogmas engaged the great man's imagination little or not at all, and so might, had he in fact rejected them, have made him a heretic. The point is that he did not reject them: he went through the list of them, delivering at each verse a trumpet-voiced assurance that, yes, he did believe: Credo! Credo! If he did not personally see how they fitted in, or if he could not think that they deserved in his music the same space he gave to the birth of God the Son from God the Father (Deum de Deo, Lumen de Lumine, Deum verum de Deo vero - in which an unbelievably brilliant series of echo effects gives the very sense of the birth of God from God in a way you could hardly imagine any mortal creature could envisage, let alone render), of His incarnation, His death, His burial, His resurrection, and His everlasting reign, and later in the Benedictus at once of His ride into Jerusalem on a donkey and His constantly repeated incarnation in the transubstantiated Host; if one way or another Beethoven could not give the same attention to Holy Ghost, Church and baptism as he gave to Father, Son, resurrection, and eternal life (his music for which closes the Creed with enormous power) he took them on trust as part of the Catholic faith on which his being rested, and gave them out with the same assurance, if not the same extent, as the other dogmas of the Nicene Creed.
Nothing could be more Catholic than this. The basic difference between Catholic and Protestant is not doctrinal, since there is no such thing as Protestant doctrine, and it is very hard to find one single idea that has not at some point been upheld by some Protestant body. It is that between trust and arrogance; Catholics don't place their own wee individual experience at the centre of the universe. Their faith is not "blind", since it does rest on individual experience of God, but it does not limit itself to individual and possibly delusive feelings: it accepts as reliable the long tradition of other men and women who adhered to the same truths. A Catholic may not feel the same enthusiasm for all the Church's doctrines, but he will not draw the Protestant and wholly senseless conclusion that because they mean nothing to him, therefore they are impious and unChristian.
This is exactly Beethoven's attitude in the Missa Solemnis. He does not give the same weight to every statement in the Latin Mass; some parts of the Creed (the Spirit speaking through the Prophets, and the Church itself) he gives little space to, passing them over with a firm but curt Credo! Credo! - I believe! I believe! He does not deny their validity, but he has nothing personal to say about them as he has for Father, Son, Creation, Incarnation, Death, Resurrection, Judgement, and Life Eternal. Indeed, I would say that Brahms in the Deutsches Requiem was less an artist (though still very great) than old Ludwig of Bonn whom he worshipped, just to the extent to which he approached his material with the very Protestant but not very Christian idea of selecting a group of Bible texts that made sense to him. I'm afraid that makes it far too easy, and to that extent inartistic: artists are not supposed to smooth over difficulties and to produce what is pleasing to them only, but to deal with things as they are.
But the most incontrovertible proof of Beethoven's Catholicism is in the Benedictus, which he designed to overrun its proper place in the Mass and cover the Consecration of the Host. How, then, does Beethoven describe the Consecration? Let's pay attention. The symphonic movement opens with a brooding, low-voiced weave of notes, echoed on instrument after instrument, with the four parts of the choir each repeating the words Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus in the lowest register it can reach. There is something inexpressibly mournful and Earth-bound about this sound, as though the corporeal universe lamented its own dull, heavy materiality; and this lament takes the shape of a brooding on the holiness of God - Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus. Under it all there is a slow but steady beat, rather like a funeral march - and yet not so much like a funeral as like a relentless trudge; the rhythm, one might say, of matter without spirit, of an ever-rolling, dark universe.
The music grows tense and expectant, nervously repeating the words Dominus, Dominus Deus Sabaoth - Lord, Lord God of Hosts; and suddenly this nervous expectation is answered by a wild, uncontrollable burst of sheer force. Pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria tua; Hosanna in excelsis! As suddenly as this tremendous manifestation of God's power has appeared, it vanishes, returning the music to its low, brooding tone - expression of matter alone, desolate, deprived of Spirit. All that has happened so far is that the power of God and the helplessness of matter have been unforgettably contrasted.
And then something miraculous happens: just when the slow circle of brooding music has reached its lowest point - and its natural termination - it is answered by a single, soaring violin like a light in the sky. Suddenly our eyes are lifted from the darkness of material existence, and the music finds its voice again. Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini: blessed is He Who comes in the name of the Lord. The total dichotomy between Divine power and material helplessness is overcome; something has come through, not to challenge with trumpet and shout, but to enter, with the same tune and the same song, the music of material life. Something has come in the name of the Lord, and He is blessed.
The slow beat that had underlain the brooding music now comes into its own as the slow march on whose step instruments and voices pass to each other the tune of material existence, soaring, growing, rising. Certainly Beethoven is thinking of Jesus' entrance into Jerusalem, when the crowd blessed the One Who came in the name of the Lord; but his thought is not simply of triumph. The march is at once triumphant and tragic, bearing in itself triumph, death, and resurrection - at its end is not just the Temple, but Golgotha; and not just Golgotha, but the open grave and the rolled stone.
And yet there is more to it than just a historical picture. The course of the music is not pictorial, save in the grandest and most basic way possible. That darkness from which it rises, that darkness from which the Spirit - depicted by the violin - lifts it by a sort of musical miracle, until the choir can join together to hail the miracle, Hosanna in excelsis - that darkness is the darkness of matter; and what happens to it is Transubstantiation. The movement closes with the whole orchestra and choir soaring on quite another level from that on which they had opened; the music is the same, but there is no going back to the darkness of the opening. By the miraculous intervention of the Spirit, beginning from the moment where the whole music seemed to have to end, it has changed its nature from darkness to light. Please notice that Beethoven had allowed every propulsive force he could find in his chord sequence to exhaust itself before he brought in his violin miracle; there was nothing left for it to say until He who comes in the name of the Lord changed its nature, not by a furious outburst of power (we had already had that) but by entering and changing it.
This is Transubstantiation pure and simple, the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist against which almost every Protestant rebelled. Not that the Protestant doctrine - the Eucharist as pregnant memory of Jesus - is denied; as I pointed out, the historical memory is there firm and clear. But it is integrated into a greater whole. Beethoven could never in a million years have composed this piece without the spiritual heritage of seventeen Catholic centuries behind him. You cannot separate the music from its theological content; the great genius bent every resource of skill he had to express a concept that was the very reverse of vague. This is the Catholic faith in music; anyone who says otherwise doesn't know how to listen.
(Incidentally, a recent discovery that throws a very positive light on Beethoven was made by the great Beethoven scholar Maynard Solomon. He proved conclusively that the "immortal beloved" of Beethoven's famous letter was Antonie Brentano, the wife of a friend of his. The story Solomon has discovered reflects finely on everybody concerned: Antonie Brentano was a woman of exceptional culture and nobility of character, who became a sort of patron saint to the whole city of Frankfurt later in life and whose account of her care for a mentally sick daughter is a story of unselfconscious heroism. Beethoven loved the right woman in her. He also behaved, for a man with a reputation for selfish caprice, extremely well: in spite being in love to an extreme degree, he refused to come between Antonie and her husband, who was a dear friend of his; and both of them - though what they knew or did not know was never revealed - remained his friends and supporters, even after moving away from Vienna. It is a story full of nobility and heartbreak, worthy of Beethoven's own music.)