The challenge of the late mass, which Beethoven himself described as ‘thegreatest work(s) I have written so far’, is extraordinary. Masterpieces with similarly intense artistic demands on all performers can be counted on one hand. Nevertheless, the story of the work’s creation begins quite unspectacularly:
in 1819, Archduke Rudolph, the composer’s former pupil and loyal patron, is appointed to succeed him as the new Archbishop of Olomouc. In view of the Archduke’s poor state of health, the enthronement service is set for 9 March 1820. Beethoven promptly and euphorically declares his willingness to‘contribute to the glorification of this solemn day’. However, the Missa was not completed in time and the Archbishop had to make do with a mass by Johann Nepomuk Hummel that was already in the repertoire on 9 March 1820.
The completion of the Missa solemnis was ultimately delayed by a further three years; the finished autograph of the work was available in January 1823. A copy of the score was presented to the dedicatee by Beethoven on 19 March 1823 – another faux pas by the composer, who, piquantly, had made a mistake in the date of the anniversary of the bishop’s consecration.
Beethoven then causes similar confusion when he offers the ‘almost finished score’ to various publishers, although it is far from finished. He also holds out the prospect of concluding contracts, but these never materialise as he makes further offers to other publishers in order to negotiate a better fee. In the end, even agreed advance payments have to be refunded.
The Missa solemnis is premiered on 18 April 1824 (200 years ago) in the Old Philharmonic Hall in St. Petersburg and on 7 May 2024 in parts (Kyrie, Credo and Agnus Dei) at a Viennese academy together with the 9th Symphony and the overture ‘Die Weihe des Hauses’ conducted by the composer.
The Schott publishing house published the Missa in April 1827, one month after Beethoven’s death. The first complete performance after the work went to press took place in 1830, a considerable time later.
The peculiarities of the work’s genesis are reflected in the structures and dimensions of this mass composition, which take up the common thread of the church music tradition, but clearly go beyond the actual liturgical framework – the occasion of the composition – in its form. This Missa does not fit into the church, it belongs in a concert hall. It does not fit into a church service, but asserts itself as a unique work in the concert programme.
All attempts to emphasise the character of the liturgical nevertheless, including more recent ones of our time, cannot resolve the permanent dichotomy between abstract religious sentiment on the one hand and the concrete dialectical principle of artistic conception on the other. Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht addresses this problem in his 1997 essay ‘Beethoven’s late work’ and recognises in it what is “actually late” about the Missa solemnis: it is “the emergence of religious music from the context of ecclesiastical ties. The mass text, including the elevation, is generalised into religious feelings. The Christian God becomes the deity, the congregation becomes humanity”. The ‘Traditionsemphase’ of the Missa signalled “the religiousness of a new time, the time post-Enlightenment”.
The Missa already has an unmistakable relationship to its ‘sister work’, the 9th Symphony, due to the temporal proximity of its composition, which, when considered closely, evokes parallel worlds in terms of content. In his 2003 introduction to the Missa (Bärenreiter), Sven Hiemke describes the astonishing reluctance of musicologists to approach the work analytically. It took more than 150 years after its composition before music-theoretical endeavours could really do justice to the need for an analysis of the compositional techniques, an investigation of the outline and conceptual development of the work’s structure and a thorough examination of the compositional structures of the Missa.
Considering the particular challenge of reading and deciphering Beethoven’s manuscript alone, one can appreciate the problems involved in studying the manuscripts and handwritten sources, especially knowing that the score was first published after Beethoven’s death. It seems quite natural that a number of misunderstandings were ultimately the result of the respective editions.
New research and studies of the sources and sketches prompted Ernst Herttrich to publish a new edition with Carus-Verlag in 2010. This version is the basis for today’s performance and occasionally differs considerably from other, familiar or customary versions. In addition to a number of details of the dynamics, the editorial deviations mainly concerned all those passages of the score that were very strikingly different from everything that was customary in the tradition of the time.
The innovation of the Missa solemnis was – and still is today – hardly comparable with the works of his contemporaries. Many things seem to have been turned upside down and therefore raise the question of whether they could really have been meant that way or whether they were due to an oversight or mistake during the writing process. Much was ‘supplemented’ or adapted by the respective editor because the overly bold deviation from the usual scheme of mass settings gave rise to scepticism. All the differentiations in parallel passages seem to have reinforced the same doubts.
Yet it is precisely these unevennesses in the work that can unfold an enormous significance. The sometimes radical departure from traditional principles in the composition of a mass, such as the completely unfamiliar arrangement of the Sanctus as a solo vocal movement and the reorganisation of the Hosanna after the Benedictus, which usually – and certainly up to the present day – consisted of repetition, still has a disconcerting effect today.
In the original, the first Hosanna is limited to the vocal solos, although they are certainly chorally structured; the second Hosanna is then actually to be sung by the choir. The necessity of the Hosanna variants may also be plausible because something happens between the Sanctus and Benedictus that necessitates the change in music. A symphonic idea runs through the movement from the Sanctus to the Benedictus and thus contradicts the liturgical principle of a traditional, ritualised repetition.
Quite apart from this, Beethoven succeeds in significantly extending the length of the Sanctus and Benedictus movements, as well as the Agnus Dei, so that the mass does not consist of three smaller and two large movements as usual, but instead treats five movements with equal weight. The Benedictus and the Agnus Dei thus become the musical focus and offer an equal counterpart to the Gloria and Credo, a concept that Beethoven had already successfully trialled in his first mass.
The Missa initially has a mysteriously unsettling effect; the inspiration of the music is not apparent at first hearing.
In his 1959 essay ‘Verfremdetes Hauptwerk’, Theodor W. Adorno denies the Missa solemnis the title of a masterpiece in general and contradicts an interpretation that bases its uniqueness on the incomprehensible. He criticises nothing less than a substantial lack of compositional quality, compositional innovation and the development of thematic ideas. The appreciation of the Missa is based on the banal circumstance of its late composition, the work balances “on a point of indifference that approaches nothingness”. Now, virtuoso rhetorical ambitions are no substitute for substantive, intellectual debate, either in general or in particular within musicology. The validity of Adorno’s judgement can be confidently questioned today. Nevertheless, the question remains as to the complicated access granted by the work, both for listeners and performers.
The language of the heart of one of the greatest composers in the history of music does not reach our hearts as a matter of course. And that is surprising. As a motto, Beethoven writes the legendary sentence in the autograph over the Kyrie: ‘From the heart – may it again – go to the heart! This creates the expectation of a listening experience that does not materialise. Why is that?
The complexity of the basic structure of the work corresponds to the technical craftsmanship of the composition. Beethoven combines the instruments to create new sound registers with the usual orchestral instrumentation of his time. The contrabassoon emancipates itself to a certain extent from the woodwind section and joins the string double basses. The horns change their functions, as do the trombones, which partly utilise the custom of Viennese classical music and accompany the choir colla parte, only to quickly become independent again.
The woodwinds are dominated by the Beethoven register, a combination of clarinets and bassoons, which are very often played in four-part movements and form the core of the composition. This ‘new’ woodwind register developed in the course of Beethoven’s compositional work and represents a genuine historical innovation which – taken up by Brahms – established itself as an important tonal element in the Romantic period.
The voice-leading, especially in the choral writing, is extremely unusual and seems awkward at first glance, but is always motivated by the content. The constant leaps of sixths in the various voices of the choir and solos are not only striking; in addition to the very complicated rhythmic form of the themes and motifs, which is very characteristic of Beethoven’s language, they form a special creative element. They are also the real challenge when rehearsing the work.
Walter Riezler had already discovered a motivic bracket within the Missa in his Beethoven book in the first half of the 20th century, which he identifies as a primal motif and original compositional cell. However, this is very unspecific and can only be interpreted as an abstract profile that manifests itself in a motto-like disposition of the motifs.
Against this background, Carl Dahlhaus stated “sub-motivic connections” that reveal themselves processually in symphonic form and set reference points that ultimately guarantee their formal cohesion. It is a “semi-latent, sub-motivic layer of the composition” that Dahlhaus documented for the Missa in his 1987 Beethoven book. The music of the Missa does not ‘offer’ itself to the inclined listener, it merely invites them to observe a self-developing momentum.
Scale movements in the opposite direction run through the counterpoint in many places, in which there is talk of a perfection and fulfilment that presents itself to us as a general religious vision and ultimately dispenses with words in a completely unspecific way. It gives the musical language the space of “‘becoming art’ of the divine service”, which Jan Assmann ascribes to the Missa in his 2020 book ‘Kult und Kunst’. In this sense, the Ordinarium serves as the libretto of an oratorio and emancipates itself from the framework of the original.
It may seem paradoxical, but Beethoven’s explicit reference to his relationship to the tradition of church music history, his engagement with works by old masters and his study of Gregorian chant, which he studied intensively in connection with the composition, are in no way contradictory to this basic musical and artistic idea – quite the opposite. Adorno’s thesis of ‘neutralisation’ when changing perspectives from the context of life cannot do justice to the significance of the Missa solemnis, because the ‘new’ mass behaves in an emancipatory manner in the way it ‘becomes art’ as a musical counterpart and thus opens up new perspectives that virtually transcend the actual functional occasion. Something new is being created here that has long been familiar to modern listeners of today’s church music.
In the Kyrie, Beethoven already asserts the idea of the symphonic in his differentiated, motivic-thematic work, which unfolds in the familiar A-B-A form but develops independently. There is already no doubt as to the composer’s intention. In principle, the contemplative Kyrie is contrasted with a contrapuntally active Christe.
The composition continues with an expansive Gloria, the substance of which is a single euphoric outburst. The few lyrical islands(Et in terra pax, Gratias) in the powerful hymn of praise intensify this in their contrast, until finally the Qui tollis helps the lyrical tone to become suitable for congregational song, which is interrupted by rhythmic cries of miserereandleads to a new hymn of praise: Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris. The operatically alienated liturgical‘ah! miserere nobis’ then ends the episode in the supplications of the faithful congregation and leads back to the opening note of the Gloria, which leads into a large-scale fugue dominated by an unusually striking fugue theme and which moves its development purposefully towards a stretta, in which, with all the refinements of contrapuntal compositional techniques (narrowing of the theme, along with augmentation and transformation into a faux-bourdon), the music from the beginning of the movement overflows and discharges in a Presto frenzy.
The Credo is much more differentiated in terms of content and is subdivided into detailed mosaics. A major highlight is the proclamation of Jesus’ incarnation Et homo factus est, which marks the centre of the work, so to speak, and in its Maestoso adds a secularised confession to the religious beliefs like a humanist manifesto of the Enlightenment.
For the Et incarnatus, Beethoven gives the choral choir a special, emphasised function. The stations of Jesus’ life are introduced in the tone of a chorale schola. The choral choir retains the emphasised position when it proclaims the resurrection after the Crucifixus , which is broken down into small parts and motifs. In addition, the chorus choir alone is reserved for the setting of the movement: Credo in unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam Ecclesiam . However, it gets lost in the hurried interweaving of movements with the other voices and seems rather pro forma ‘accommodated’.
Finally, Beethoven surprises us with the unusually restrained Et vitam venturi fugue. It seems like an allegro in slow motion and forces us to listen. Eternal life is presented here like a vision of perfection. We will find it again at the end of Dona nobis pacem. Interrupted by an episodic outburst in tempo and dynamics – the interruption of the slow motion – the Credo ends in the serenity of certainty.
As already mentioned, Beethoven now remains in an intimate prelude style in the Sanctus, which – as already described – leads to the most intimate moment of the mass, the Benedictus. A prelude, the instrumental introduction, leads to a solo part of the Missa that literally leaves the word behind. The solo violin becomes the new and dominant soloist within this movement.
With the conclusion in the Agnus Dei, Beethoven achieves a spectacular masterpiece that was extraordinary in its expressive intensity and music-historical significance and remains so to this day. The theme – as Beethoven assures us once again in the written addendum – is the plea for inner and outer peace. War and peace are dialectically organised and unmistakably juxtaposed in thesis and antithesis. In the second part of the movement, Beethoven uses the actual Agnus Dei as a model for his war music, which sounds with trumpet signals and the timpani, unquestionable in its meaning and is answered with anxious calls for peace.
In Ferdinand Ries’s notes, he quotes memories of his brother Caspar when Napoleon’s troops besieged Vienna in 1809. Beethoven spent “most of the time in a cellar with his brother Caspar”, “where he still covered his head with pillows so as not to hear the cannons”. Unfortunately, 200 years on, we have no reason to be neutral about this traumatic experience in connection with war. Beethoven’s work remains frighteningly topical and is deeply unsettling, especially today.
The contrapuntal scales in contrary motion bring the unconventional mass to a close. Hope remains, the final chord, but the end of the work is open, because the plea for peace is still visionary today.
If you read the musical text very carefully and do not ignore the Beethoven accents, you will come across the sceptic’s question in the choir’s musical text at the end: “Pacem?” The composer answers the question himself: “Pacem!” The choir’s desperate cry over the unreal rhythms of a military march, which become entangled in an orchestral battle: Agnus Dei, dona pacem! is met by the optimist Beethoven with a definite: Pacem, pacem!!!
Perhaps we can be infected by the composer, take his vision home with us and carry his hope into our world.
