The Consolation of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis

THE EVENTS OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 were more of the outrages that countless human beings have committed upon their own kind over the last two thousand years. They were evidence of the unimaginable cruelty in the human heart that can commit crimes for which humanity certainly should be accurst. They were an italicizing of the "no of all nothing," words I use out of context with profound apologies to e. e. cummings. At the same time, the responses to these events by other human beings displayed a will never to permit carnage, the crumbling of real estate, the noise of horror, or the rain of dust to smother the flowering of the spirit. They broke the daily indifference to the fate of others. They nourished the belief that we can build Jerusalem if we will. Finally, vast numbers of us, suspended between these polarities because we abhorred and could not understand the one extremity and because for various reasons we could not physically demonstrate the other, searched for means of consolation.

As a member of this last group, I listened again—and again and again—to Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, a masterwork I had sung, studied, and heard on several occasions in my life but that was now to have meanings heretofore not grasped. Early in my career as a professional singer in New York City, I was privileged to be a chorus member for a performance of the Missa Solemnis conducted by Arturo Toscanini one year before he died. In both rehearsal and performance our attention was focused on the Maestro, a diminutive man with a gigantic resoluteness about his interpretation of the music. His fingers that seemed extraordinarily long suggested they would discharge electric currents into us if that were what it would take to extract the performance he demanded. Even at his wake, as he lay at last with energy subdued, I could not move my eyes from those eagle-talon fingers that hinted they would disentangle the rosary that intertwined them and draw sound from my throat. For a young performer, Beethoven's Mass was largely the vehicle, albeit a magnificent one, for carrying out Toscanini's will, a will primarily for technical excellence. On one occasion when commenting on Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, Toscanini remarked that for some the first movement was Napoleon, for others Alexander, but for him it was allegro con brio. His, and thus our, approach to the Missa Solemnis was exactly the same as his approach to the 3rd Symphony.

As a voice major at The Juilliard School of Music, I was required to study theory, counterpoint, music history, conducting, and repertoire, and in that curriculum the Missa Solemnis, along with other works, was primarily a textbook. I learned to discover the portions that adopted the relative minor key of B minor in a work written in D major, the modal settings of key passages, the fugues and polyphonic writing, the influences of Catholic hymns and Psalms and chorales of the monks, the specific measures indebted to Bach and to Haydn's Mass in Time of War, and on and on. Such practice helped me learn much, but it explored the Mass as an accumulation of parts. It reduced a work largely of the heart to a work only of the head.

Don't misunderstand. The knowledge from that study girded well and meaningfully my emotional and sacral response to Beethoven's spiritual creation, but in the end, to use Richard Osborne's fine words in his background note to the EMI/Angel recording (SB-3836) with conductor Carlo Maria Giulini: "To follow the work, to understand it, we need no learned analyses, no theological treatises, but only the text itself. For it is Beethoven's blazing and sincere response to the Catholic missal, his awe in the face of God and his intensely dramatic ordering of the...