Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  The opening Gloria theme in 3/4 and D major is an explosion of exaltation, the horns and trumpets vaulting upward in a figure recalling Handel and the Baroque:27

  Had there ever been a more glorious Gloria? It begins full-blown, with a blaze of excitement, but that will be only a point of departure. The rising Gloria theme, meanwhile, pictures this moment in the service when the celebrant raises his arms to express joy. After spine-chilling pages, the music turns in a second to a soft and beautiful evocation of pax hominibus, peace to humankind. If the Kyrie amounted to an austerely devotional introduction to this quasi-symphonic mass, the blazing Gloria is the first movement proper. In its course, starting with the turn from gloria to pax, it reveals how Beethoven is going to build a sectional form founded on minute picturing of the text.

  Laudamus te, we praise You, breaks out using the Gloria figure, now offset to begin on the third beat of the bar. Adoramus te, we adore You, is another sudden pianissimo, evoking the moment where the celebrant bows his head.28 (If the mass ultimately goes beyond the church and its priests, aiming toward God without intervention, it nonetheless encompasses visceral images of the Catholic rite even as it transcends them.) Glorificamus te, we glorify You, is a short vigorous fugato on a leaping subject. With a hushed turn to B-flat major, the soloists lead a brief Gratias agimus tibi, we give thanks to You for Your great glory. With the arrival of Domine Deus, rex coelestis, Lord God, King of Heaven, Beethoven mobilizes the hard d’s of the Latin for cries of adoration, building to a tremendous triple-forte chord on omnipotens, omnipotent.29

  The tempo slows to larghetto for the middle section, introduced by the winds to prepare pathos-filled entreaties: Qui tollis peccata mundi, Who takes away the sins of the world, Who sits at the right hand of God, have mercy on us. Here Beethoven concentrates on miserere ­nobis. The words are whispered over trembling figures in the strings and keened by the soloists; they mount to an anguished entreaty. Quoniam tu solus sanctus Dominus, For You alone are holy, Lord, starts the third section with a virile theme conjuring the power of God. In the climax the trombones—a sounding image of God’s power—enter for the first time.30

  In another quick turn of tempo and mood, the grandest and most vigorous fugue yet breaks out on in gloria Dei patris, in the glory of God the Father. (The choral lines are accompanied by trombones, the players’ struggle to manage their scampering parts adding to the intensity.)31 That fugue is marked allegro, ma non troppo—fast, but not too much—but even then it is plenty awkward for the singers. The climax of that section begins with an Amen marked poco più allegro, a little faster, at which point the music becomes manifestly too much: in a double fugue the Amen figure is combined with the in gloria Dei patris theme, both heard right-side up and inverted, at speeds verging on unsingable.32 That mounts to yet another climax, vertiginous for listeners, its cries of Amen! playing dazzling tag with the meter.

  Within the contrapuntal fabric of the Gloria we hear the upbeat motif, appearing much of the time as the old contrapuntal device of syncopations and suspensions tied over the bar. Here is another case in Beethoven of a familiar idea or device that was traditionally a local event—an arpeggio, a trill, a Neapolitan sixth, a suspension tied over the bar—turned into motif and expression by being treated as a theme. The fortississimo chord on omnipotens is a climactic example of the upbeat motif: the glory of the word comes in early on the third beat, ecstatically shattering the meter.

  Ecstatic upbeats and displaced downbeats run riot in the apparently unsurpassable climax of the Amen. Then Beethoven surpasses it. He brings back the opening Gloria theme at a hair-raising pitch, the shouts of Gloria! seeming to fill heaven and earth, until his final coup: the last Gloria comes in on an upbeat, the orchestra plays a crashing fortissimo chord on the downbeat, and the choir alone finishes its triumphal shout in midbar, as upbeat to a breathtaking silence. The audience feels lifted, hearts pounding, into the air. In this mass full of thrilling visceral moments, in a work intended to raise us closer to God, this is the most exalting of all.

  Credo

  This part of the service is a series of avowals of belief, distilled in the two blunt syllables of the word Credo with which Beethoven begins the movement and punctuates much of it:

  First proclaimed by the trombones in octaves, the theme is assertive, the word Credo repeated twice, the first as upbeat to the second, where its two syllables stride emphatically on the beat. This movement, with its proclamations of faith, will mostly stay rooted on the beat and within the meter. In its dimension as a quasi-symphonic mass, if the Kyrie is like an introduction and the Gloria a fast-tempo quasi–first movement, the Credo is a middle movement whose core tempo is moderate.

  By now Beethoven’s treatment of the text is established. At the outset he decided on the primacy of the word, in its sense and its sound. Like all composers in some degree or other, but with more intensity than most, he expresses the words in several dimensions at once.

  First, there is the overall expressive atmosphere of the section at hand: the staunch assertion of the Credo, for example, sets the fundamental tone of the movement, and that enfolds the hushed mystery and awe of the et incarnatus.

  Second, there is a constant attention to painting individual words and phrases: omnipotens, invisibilium, ascendit, descendit, pacem. Each word and phrase gets its distinctive melodic contour, rhythm, and color within the larger profile of the section and the movement. At times the orchestra does the word painting, or amplifies it, as in the trembling strings under the wailing lines of miserere nobis. All this word painting is firmly within the tradition of Handel in Messiah and elsewhere. (Recall, for one small example, how pictorially Handel sets the phrases “have gone astray” and “the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.”)

  Third, as noted before, Beethoven translates the spoken inflection and rhythm of the text into the music, then uses sound as expression: the hard c and d of Credo become a pounding affirmation; the d’s of Deum de Deo are set to a soaring line evoking divine power; Et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto is mystical starting in its s’s and open vowels. Because of the varying rhythms of the words, Beethoven never wields the monorhythmic effects he used in the Fifth through Seventh Symphonies. There is a constantly shifting rhythmic variety and forward drive, all of it founded on the text. Flexible, driving, constantly varied rhythm is one of the glories of the Missa solemnis.

  Fourth, at times he inflects a word or a line with symbolic gestures, such as the flute’s birdcalls behind the et incarnatus. At times he reinterprets a phrase in differing tones: in the Agnus Dei, the dona nobis pacem begins as a prayer in a pastoral mode; in the course of the movement, those words become a demand, a terrified entreaty, once again a prayer. Finally, at times he picks out a single unexpected word to make a point: the repeated et at several points in the Credo, all of them pointing forward to the most important ands: et resurrexit, et ascendit.

  In the Credo Beethoven again reflected Viennese mass traditions and at the same time adapted and amplified them. He laid the movement out in the usual three sections, fast–slow–fast. The key is B-flat major, his leading secondary key (a mediant, not a dominant). The first section issues its assertions of belief: in one God, the son of God, true God, the Son consubstantial with the Father, the Son who descended from heaven for our salvation. Most of this is set in a forceful stride, forte to fortissimo, largely with full orchestra and staunch trombones. There are dizzying descents on the phrase descendit de coelis, came down from heaven. (The sopranos are required to make a cruel plunge of an octave and a half from a screaming high B-flat, then to leap back up to the B-flat.) In the middle of the first section there is a sudden turn to a hushed D-flat major, lines flowing up in a long ascent to herald the coming of Christ. Those long ascents will return memorably.33 This is a movement full of foreshadowings, among them the winds’ E-flat-major chord of the beginning, a high harmony that is going to emerge as another symbol of divinity.34

  At the
end of the first section comes a sudden hush to announce the central mystery of the faith: Et incarnatus est. To paint the sublime incarnation in the Virgin Mary, Beethoven takes up two ancient topics. The music is in Dorian mode, the old church scale whose character, he read in the work of the Renaissance theorist Zarlino, is “the donor of modesty and the preserver of chastity”35—fitting for Mary’s immaculate conception. Beyond that he was interested in these modes for an antiquity that implies holiness. He wrote, “In the old church modes the devotion is divine . . . and [may] God let me express it someday.”36

  Hovering over hushed and mystical Dorian-mode phrases in the choir is a flute playing fluttering birdcalls. Here Beethoven paints an image that originated in scripture. After John the Baptist baptized Jesus, there was a vision of the Holy Spirit descending from heaven in the form of a dove. Another old tradition says that Jesus was conceived by that dove of the Spirit through Mary’s ear—so by means of the Word. The holy dove turned up in Renaissance paintings portraying the incarnation. The flute’s birdcalls here are not literally those of a dove or any other bird but imaginary birdcalls to conjure a spirit not of this earth. (Beethoven added the flute flutters as an afterthought to the “final” manuscript.)37

  The incarnation, then the crucifixion. As the tragic center of the mass for many composers, including Bach, the “Crucifixus” is a movement in itself. Beethoven treats it relatively briefly, but distinctively: mostly inward, a spiritual as much as physical agony. At first the words are chanted by the choir in anguished harmonies while the strings play shuddering, piercing figures in accompaniment. The word passus brings a wailing line from bassoon and strings, the music finally falling to pianissimo darkness for the descent into the sepulchre.38

  Many composers also make a whole movement of the joyous next section: Et resurrexit, And resurrected on the third day, according to the scriptures. Beethoven handles that announcement briskly in six bars of pealing declamation, first announced by the tenors on a high G and then in the choir in modal harmonies.39

  More so than the resurrection, Beethoven is interested in the ascent to heaven: et ascendit in long, rocketing lines. Now comes the most dogmatic and troublesome part of the Credo. Christ sits at the right hand of God in judgment of the quick and the dead; then come the declarations of belief in the Trinity, in the one true church, in one baptism, in the resurrection of the dead. Again, it is not recorded precisely what Beethoven believed in regard to eternal life, likewise the celestial family and their cosmic courtroom. Of course, he could not presume to edit out the phrases dealing with these matters. Instead, he turned them to musical purposes: while the foreground takes up the opening Credo figure, in the background the dogmatic phrases are chanted like a priest rushing through the liturgy, creating a rhythmic energy that adds tremendous exhilaration to the cries of Credo! It comes down to the concluding “I look forward to the resurrection of the dead, and to life ever after,” finished with mighty Amens.

  But Beethoven is not finished with that last phrase, et vitam venturi saeculi, amen. On those words he erects a lilting, gentle tour de force of a fugue fleshed out with various contrapuntal devices: double fugue, inversion, stretto, diminution. The main theme is built on a chain of seven descending thirds that keep cycling in voice after voice, an evocation of eternity.40 The fugue stretches out in a great arch, gathering and intensifying. Then with an allegro con moto injection it sprints forward, once again straining the limits of human voices. Once again, rhythms ecstatically spill over the bar line. As coda there is a slowing to grave, and amid chains of long scalewise ascents the music sinks to meditative exhaustion. Finally one more rising scale figure, the longest yet in the mass, starts from the bottom of the orchestra and flows upward until it reaches the flute that represented the holy dove. As scale figures rise up again and again, answered by scales sinking down, the movement ends on the same high E-flat chord it began with, now made ethereal. That coloration will soon return, unforgettably.

  Here Beethoven reveals what he means by these lines flowing up and down. Recall Kant’s words, in Beethoven’s phrasing: “The moral law within us, and the starry sky above us.” In the late music, in high and luminous sonorities Beethoven viscerally evokes that image of the divine—in the shimmering trills of the late piano sonatas, in the Missa solemnis and the Ninth Symphony, in the string quartets to come.41 The long lines rippling up and down are another part of that image: the spirit of humanity reaching upward, the divine spirit descending. Christ stands as the prime avatar of that cosmic circuit. Here again is Kant’s interchange of God and humanity, the order of nature and human morality being reflections of divine order.

  Sanctus

  The first words of the Sanctus are adapted from the Old Testament prophet Isaiah, who had a vision of God on His throne surrounded by six-winged seraphim eternally crying praises: Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, Dominus Deus Sabaoth! Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth! Heaven and earth are full of thy Glory! Hosanna in the highest! For many composers, including Bach, the operative word is glory: the music evokes the majesty of God as He holds court from His throne.

  Beethoven takes an entirely different path. It is in this and the next movement that he journeys the furthest from traditional interpretations of the text. He begins the Sanctus softly in D major, in a tone of solemn, ceremonial devotion. Much of it will be quiet, sung by the soloists rather than the full choir. He presumably had several reasons for this choice, including some needed calm and textural variety, but one choice is particularly meaningful. The central point of the Mass in church, and a central point of Catholic devotion, is the Eucharist. In a reenactment of the Last Supper, the celebrant raises the cup of wine, which is transubstantiated into the actual blood of Christ. Salvation depends on this sacrament, drinking the blood and eating the bread, which has become the body of Christ.42 In the Missa solemnis that sacrament which occurs in the middle of the Sanctus casts its influence backward to the quiet orchestral beginning of the movement. The great perorations and towering climaxes that marked the Gloria and Credo will not be heard here.

  The Sanctus begins with a sigh in the basses that rises to a texture of low strings with divided violas, horns, and low clarinets. The effect conjures the sound of an organ in quiet stops. The brass intone solemn chords, bringing in the soloists with their prayerful phrases.43 The mood is the opposite of the glorious panoply often associated with this text. Beethoven was not so concerned with eternal salvation or six-winged seraphim. He was concerned with deeper mysteries. He aimed the movement toward its conclusion, the Benedictus.

  The first section of the Sanctus ends with the soloists murmuring Dominus Deus Sabaoth at pianissimo, like priests at a distant altar. The Pleni sunt coeli, Heaven and earth are full of Thy glory, breaks out in a soaring fugue surrounded by racing strings. While the whole of the Missa solemnis is informed by Handel, this may be the most overtly Handelian moment.44 The Pleni fugue is answered by a short, skipping fugue in 3/4 that dispenses briskly with Hosanna in excelsis. Many composers dwell on that line, but Beethoven wants to get on to his central section. From the Hosanna he shifts direction in seconds.45

  The next pages, for orchestra alone, in a remarkable subdued organlike color, echo the beginning of the movement, with divided violas and cellos, the texture made ethereal by low flutes. In the event that this was an actual service, here the Eucharist would be celebrated. Beethoven labels the section Präludium. He has in mind the tradition in which organists would prelude, meaning improvise, during the Eucharist to join the Hosanna to the next section, the Benedictus.46 So now he creates a searching, chromatic, quasi-improvisation in imitation of an organ. These pages are more a matter of mystery than practical musical continuity: in a sound and texture unique in music of its time, Beethoven conjures a tangible presence of the numinous, in preparation for what follows. Meanwhile, if with the Dominus Deus he supplied the chanting priests, here he supplies the church organist. In both respects, as in other parts of the mass, he s
ubsumes the literal rite in the music.

  In one of his quietly breathtaking moments, at the end of the Präludium, suspended high in musical space, comes another ethereal chord in two flutes and a violin. They begin the Benedictus with a long descent in a lilting, pastoral 12/8, in pure G major.47 That heart-stopping high chord appears at the moment a candle would be lit on the altar to signify the moment of transubstantiation, when Christ becomes present in the bread and wine.48

  The Benedictus is marked molto cantabile, very songfully. Here is Beethoven’s evocation and interpretation of the Eucharist, summoning Christ’s descent from heaven onto the altar, into the bread and wine. It is a sui generis portrayal of that moment, that mystery, by way of an extended violin solo. Few things in music approach its gentle joy, its long-sustained beauty. Around the diaphanous singing and dancing of the Christ-violin, the choir chants, Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini, Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Chorus and orchestra concentrate on the central word, Benedictus which goes on and on as an incantation under the endless song of the violin. It is a depiction of the divine presence as a vision of transcendent beauty, like a halo transmuted into sound. It is also the central movement downward in the dialectic of up and down, the human spirit reaching up and divine grace reciprocating. Staying close to a pure, pastoral G major, the music gathers to a tutti at the end of the movement, the violin singing over all and pronouncing the final benediction.49