In one of his most intriguing and suggestive essays, the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips noted the deep irony in Sigmund Freud’s lifelong fascination with idolatry. Freud, whose consulting room was filled with ancient religious artifacts and whose late writings unfold elaborate anthropological theories on the origins of the human religious impulse, ultimately became an idol himself: not merely because of the reverence that his work inspired in his successors, but because the dynamics of true and false belief are the engine of the psychoanalytic method. In entering psychoanalytic treatment, the analysand entrusts himself to a process by which his own past patterns of attachment will be projected through dreams, fantasies, and associations upon the (one hopes) benign figure of the analyst. In the hope of learning the truth about himself, the analysand gives free rein to the expression of falsehood and illusion.
Something similar could be said about Beethoven, one of the great composers of heroic music whose own oversized image ultimately outstripped all the heroic figures his music sought to evoke. The mythology of the composer as a Romantic visionary stems largely from the example of Beethoven, whose fiery temperament and demands for freedom from institutional patronage and inherited convention came to be emblematic for generations of future artists. Here again, it is not simply that Beethoven cultivated and achieved the status of a musical icon; in some sense, the composer’s heroic identity, the scope and limits of heroic accomplishment, are the main subjects of Beethoven’s music. In his best-known works, Beethoven seems to stage a titanic struggle in which a valiant protagonist battles against overwhelming odds to achieve a victory. But Beethoven was deeply aware of the dark side of such apparent victories: the evanescence of human accomplishment, the tendency of today’s heroes to become tomorrow’s tyrants, the gradual recrudescence of evils previously defeated. This dark side of the heroic journey can be heard many times in Beethoven, particularly in the works of his “late period,” where the journey toward a satisfying final affirmation is more and more frequently undermined by unexpected musical discontinuities. We should recall that the heroic figures who inspired Beethoven’s music—Napoleon, Prometheus, Coriolanus—were all deeply flawed, men whose accomplishments came at a great cost and who left much unintended destruction in their wake. Beethoven is still his own greatest and most perceptive critic.
The grandeur and scope of Beethoven’s musical vision have encouraged generations of musicians to interpret his works as possessing a special spiritual significance, with Beethoven’s symphonies becoming the most hallowed cultic shrines in the Kunstreligion of the nineteenth century. This sacralized view of Beethoven reached its arguable pinnacle in the very strange book Beethoven: His Spiritual Development by the journalist J. W. N. Sullivan. A friend of Aldous Huxley, who drew on Sullivan’s character and his Beethovenian obsessions for the character of Maurice Spandrell in Point Counter Point, Sullivan viewed Beethoven as a mystic, whose final works reflect a uniquely privileged apprehension of reality reached through a lifetime of suffering. “Nowhere else in music,” says Sullivan of the late C-sharp minor string quartet, “are we made so aware, as here, of a state of consciousness surpassing our own, where our problems do not exist, and to which even our highest aspirations, those that we can formulate, provide no key. Those faint and troubling intimations we sometimes have of a vision different from and yet including our own, of a way of apprehending life, passionless, perfect and complete, that resolves all our discords, are here presented with the reality they had glimpsed.”
No higher view of the interior significance of Beethoven’s music can be imagined. For Sullivan, Beethoven’s mystical perception makes him a greater figure than Shakespeare, and perhaps unique in the history of all art. But this perception is expressed pre-eminently through textless instrumental music. Sullivan underrates, by comparison with the symphonies and string quartets, all of Beethoven’s vocal music: the songs, the opera Fidelio, and especially the sacred music. In Beethoven’s two Mass settings, the text of the liturgy is understood to be a mere shell of words within which the composer’s subjective experience is contained. Whatever greatness the sacred works may possess comes from the fortuitous coincidence of the sentiments of the sacred text with the composer’s privately held convictions. And those convictions, we are led to assume, must have resembled the religiously eclectic early twentieth-century spirituality of a Huxley or a Sullivan. A composer of Beethoven’s stature could not have been hampered by any conventional religious adherence, which would only have distorted the purity of his spiritual perception. “His realization of the character of life,” says Sullivan, “was not hindered by insensitiveness, as was Wagner’s, nor by religion, as was Bach’s.”
Nicholas Chong’s study The Catholic Beethoven is written largely as a broadside against views like these. Although Chong only alludes to it once, Sullivan’s book conveniently encapsulates many of the views that Chong opposes: the incompatibility of Catholic devotion with artistic accomplishment, the superiority of instrumental music to vocal music, and the view that Beethoven could not possibly have been inspired by setting sacred texts. While most of today’s scholarly authorities on Beethoven would not subscribe to Sullivan’s arch-Romantic, sacralized view of the composer, they agree that Beethoven’s religion can be dismissed, portraying him as a man of the Enlightenment who viewed Catholicism and the clergy with disdain. And Beethoven’s modern biographers have been able to draw upon documentary evidence to support this view, pointing to anticlerical sentiments expressed in Beethoven’s letters and to the excerpts from Kant and from Eastern religious texts that he copied into his notebooks. Certainly there is no evidence that Beethoven was a frequent Mass-goer or that he was conventionally devout. Yet Beethoven kept returning to Catholic liturgical texts on his own initiative, writing two Masses and sketching plans for future liturgical works, including an unfinished Requiem. Most of all, the view of Beethoven as indifferent to Catholicism founders upon the massive Missa solemnis, which Beethoven viewed as his own greatest composition. He lavished four years of painstaking work upon the Mass and chose to have his portrait painted holding the manuscript of the work. The resulting painting is by far the best-known and most frequently reproduced image of Beethoven, but it would be a shock to many of the composer’s admirers to see the score of the sacred work that he is holding.
Essential to Chong’s revisionist view is an examination of the cultural politics of Catholicism in Germany during Beethoven’s lifetime. English-speaking historians are accustomed to the idea of an implacable opposition between the Enlightenment and the Catholic Church, an idea derived mostly from the example of the French Enlightenment and summed up in Diderot’s famous bon mot about strangling the last king with the entrails of the last priest. The German Enlightenment, however, was more ideologically moderate on the subject of Catholicism. Rather than seeking the destruction of the Church, the German Enlightenment sought its reform. The Habsburg emperor Joseph II attempted to remake German-speaking Catholicism into a national church under state control and independent of the papacy, disbanding religious communities and transferring their assets to the secular clergy. Under his direction, the Catholic liturgy was simplified and partially vernacularized, the number of feast days was reduced, and ornamentation in churches was simplified.
Beethoven was nineteen years old when Joseph II died; one of his earliest works is a cantata in memory of the dead emperor. Most of Beethoven’s adult life, then, was marked by ideological conflict between those who wished to continue Joseph’s program of reform and those who sought to restore the institutions of Baroque Catholicism under the guidance of the papacy. Chong emphasizes that these were not mutually exclusive camps but broader cultural tendencies that could intermingle and hybridize in the work of individual thinkers. A preference for religious toleration, vernacular Bible reading, and moral exhortation would mark the influence of the “Catholic Enlightenment,” while the presence of a warm affective devotion to the person of Christ and a loyalty to the papacy in Rome would mark the influence of the “Catholic Restoration.” Any of these opinions, or their opposites, might co-exist within the same person, and none of them would necessarily have marked someone as outside the realm of acceptable Catholic opinion. Beethoven’s sympathy for Enlightenment figures such as Kant and Schiller, and his explorations of Eastern religion, would not have been especially unusual in this period of Catholic ideological re-alignment.
Beethoven spent the first twenty-one years of his life in Bonn, a hotbed of the Catholic Enlightenment. The city was the seat of the archbishop-elector of Cologne, reigning in exile from his cathedral city (Cologne itself being a free imperial city and not part of the ecclesiastical state governed by the archbishop). Beethoven’s father and grandfather had served as court musicians to the archbishops of Cologne since the 1730s, and Beethoven himself would ultimately become an organist at the court chapel; the archbishop who encouraged Beethoven during his adolescent years was the Archduke Maximilian Franz, the youngest brother of Joseph II. In such an environment, Beethoven’s early religious influences would have been marked by the intellectual trends of the Catholic Enlightenment and by the policies of Josephinism. Indeed, his most important composition teacher, Christian Gottlob Neefe, was a Calvinist who had been permitted to work in a Catholic court under Joseph’s policies of religious toleration.
Chong argues that Beethoven began his life under the influence of the Catholic Enlightenment but developed some level of sympathy for the resurgent Catholic Restoration in his adulthood. He points to the Catholic theologians whose works were in Beethoven’s library, particularly the Bavarian theologian Johann Michael Sailer, as indicating Beethoven’s shifting ideological position in adulthood. Sailer was an ideological moderate, a theologian who sought to critique the ideological excesses of Josephinism and the rationalistic tendencies of the Enlightenment while retaining certain positive elements of the Enlightenment tradition, such as the new openness to learning from non-Catholic and non-Christian sources. His critique of the Enlightenment took the form of a sustained engagement with Kant, whom he blamed for promulgating a rationalistic ethics severed from the love of God. In Sailer’s view, an intimate relationship with Christ was the prerequisite for true love of neighbor and the basis of all religion: As his personal motto he took the phrase Gott in Christus—das Heil der Welt (God in Christ—the salvation of the world). Beethoven deeply admired Sailer, purchasing his books and even attempting to enlist Sailer as a tutor for his nephew. Another admirer of Sailer was Pope Benedict XVI, who praised the earlier Bavarian theologian for his richness and depth: “Only with the heart can one see properly. Sailer was a visionary because he had a heart.”
The influence of Sailer’s warm-hearted Christocentrism can be detected throughout Beethoven’s mature output of religious music. Chong’s analyses emphasize the lifelike and moving portrayal of Christ’s emotional turmoil in the oratorio Christus am Ölberge (Christ on the Mount of Olives), as well as the ideological significance of Beethoven’s choice to set to music a cycle of devotional poems by the Protestant pastor Christian Fürchtegott Gellert. Most interesting, however, is the light shed by Chong’s research on Beethoven’s two Masses’ Ordinary settings. In his writings on the liturgy, Sailer criticized the sterility and didacticism of the liturgy cultivated by Joseph II, emphasizing the liturgy as a meeting place between the inner devotion of the individual believer and the public worship of the entire congregation. This emphasis in Sailer’s liturgical theology helps to explain many features of Beethoven’s two Masses, especially the odd choices in text setting. Generations of singers have puzzled over the strange word repetitions in the Mass in C and Missa solemnis, especially the many repetitions of short linking words such as “et” and “non” (“et, et resurrexit . . . non, non erit finis”), and the wordless cries that sometimes appear in the Missa solemnis (“ah, miserere nobis”). Chong views these insertions as an attempt to turn the familiar text of the Mass into a more fallible human utterance; the singers stumble over their words, stuttering as though suddenly overcome with emotion.
There is only a brief discussion in The Catholic Beethoven of the fate of Beethoven’s Masses within the actual liturgy. Chong briefly traces the fate of the Missa solemnis, noting that the work was performed regularly at Mass in the decades following Beethoven’s death but that these performances gradually ceased in the late nineteenth century. The Mass in C, a shorter work and easier to perform, lasted longer in the repertory—it was a favorite of Saint John Henry Newman at the Birmingham Oratory—but by the twentieth century it was conventional wisdom that all of Beethoven’s sacred music was unfit for use in the actual liturgy. By the standards of the late nineteenth century, Beethoven’s music offended against the canons of Catholic sacred music because of precisely the qualities that its composer prized most: its directness of emotional expression and the way that it gives voice to the subjective feelings of the individual worshiper.
In the age of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, it is not surprising that German Catholics would feel it necessary to tighten the boundaries of Catholic identity. The irony for Beethoven’s posthumous legacy, however, is that the composer’s absorption into the Kunstreligion of an increasingly secularized Germany made him seem ever more deeply estranged from the religion he had actually practiced. And so in reading Catholic assessments of Beethoven one often detects a strange and anxious ambivalence: respect for the artistic achievement of a great Catholic composer coupled with apprehension about the insalubrious subjectivism that might accompany it. The warning of the old Catholic Encyclopedia is typical: “Living in an age and atmosphere of religious liberalism, when Hegelian pantheism pervaded the literature of the day, especially Goethe’s fiction and poetry, he could not escape their befogging influence.” This is pure guilt by association, ascribing various unrelated and historically improbable errors to Beethoven on the basis that they all belong to a shared climate of opinion; it is as though diagnosing the errors of an age made it unnecessary to get into any further specifics.
In reading The Catholic Beethoven, then, we should be prepared to question not only what we thought we knew about Beethoven but also, and more importantly, what we thought we knew about Catholicism. Chong’s book appears at a time when more and more historians are writing about lesser-known intellectual movements within early modern Catholicism, with recent volumes appearing on the Catholic Enlightenment and the legacy of Jansenism; all of this writing reveals a Catholic Church that is familiar yet strange, riven by ideological conflicts that do not map onto our own. Even if the case for Beethoven’s Catholicism has been established, we are still a long way from producing a Beethoven whose music would fit easily into a present-day liturgy or who would feel at home in a present-day parish.
In the final pages of his book, Chong points to the possibility that Beethoven’s Catholic identity may have also influenced the composition of his secular instrumental works. Some interpreters, for example, have heard the suffering of Christ in the tormented dissonances of Grosse Fuge and in Beethoven’s other late quartets. These interpretations are intriguing but ultimately impossible to prove: Beethoven might or might not have intended them, and there is now no way of knowing. Suppose, then, that it is all false: Beethoven never experienced any mystical intuitions or visions of transcendence; neither he nor his contemporaries associated the late quartets with any Christian theme; the pain and triumph that these secular works portray originates from nothing loftier than ordinary human experience. Would this be a disappointment? Would it compromise the authenticity of Beethoven’s newly established Catholicism?
If the question is put that way, then my answer is no. But the question is poorly formed. The great theological theme of Johann Michael Sailer was the unity of the two great commandments: the completion of the love of God by the love of neighbor and vice versa. As this principle works itself out, it becomes more and more difficult to draw firm distinctions between normal human emotions and elevated, pious feelings; no one who believes what Sailer believed can dismiss the subject matter of Fidelio or the Ninth Symphony as merely humanitarian and unrelated to specifically Catholic concerns. So there can be no final division between Beethoven’s humanism and his Catholicism. If we are now persuaded to believe in a Catholic Beethoven, this is not an unprecedented novelty but simply the uncovering of a new layer of integrity running through the work of a Beethoven we already know.
