The extraordinary difficulty which the Missa Solemnis presents even to straightforward understanding should not deter us from interpretation. Beethoven called it the best of his works.246 For all his diplomacy towards the Archduke, he would not have done this without an objective reason. – What first strikes us is that the Missa holds a place entirely apart from the rest of Beethoven’s oeuvre. From it there are hardly any connections to his other works, even the late ones – neither formally, nor thematically, nor in the characters, nor – above all – in the treatment of musical surfaces, in the composing itself. The sole exception, perhaps, is the variations movement from op. 127 – itself extremely obscure – which is reminiscent of the ‘Benedictas’ – but the ‘Benedictus’ is itself the exception in the Missa, the most accessible piece, the only one with a ‘character’ in the traditional sense; it might be called the mediation between the Missa and music. The obvious explanation for the remoteness of the Missa from Beethoven’s other music is its use of the church style, which in principle precludes the dynamic-dialectical character essential to his style. In Mozart, too, the sacred compositions are infinitely removed from the secular ones (not in Bach). But the question still remains why the late Beethoven, who must have stood very aloof from organized religion, devoted many years of his most mature period to a sacred work and – at the time of his most extreme subjective emancipation – experimented with the rigidly bound style. The answer seems to me to lie in direct line with Beethoven’s critique of the ‘classical’ symphonic ideal. The bound style allows him a development which was hardly permitted by instrumental music:
This is the first formulation of the problems posed by the Missa, which are entirely obscured by the habitual mixture of respect and incomprehension. Be careful of over-easy answers (deduced from the total concept of my work). The question of the Missa’s formal law is central. – NB: It lacks all unmistakably Beethovenian characteristics. He has, as it were, eliminated himself.
[286]
To Gretel’s question what was actually so incomprehensible about the Missa Solemnis, I answered first of all with the very simple observation that hardly anyone who did not know could tell by listening to the work that it was by Beethoven.
[287]
It is advisable when considering the problem of the Missa to look at other works of a related genre by Beethoven. It is highly characteristic that they are all entirely forgotten: I have not even succeeded in finding a copy of Christus am Ölberg. But I have looked closely at the C major Mass. It has in common with the Missa its unfamiliar style – no one could guess that it was by Beethoven. The indescribably tame ‘Kyrie’ is like very weak Mendelssohn. Also the episodic character, disintegrating into small details. The whole an entirely uninspired, ‘nice’ work in which Beethoven tries by force to feel his way into an entirely alien genre, in which – to his honour – he does not succeed. There would be no need to discuss this at all if these same traits did not reappear in the extremely ambitious Missa Solemnis, which does give much food for thought. – Probably decisive for the Missa was the (unquestionably intentional) omission of any developmental principle; a mere succession of formal elements, with endless simple repetition. Even in the ‘Benedictus’. This could be compared to the variations from op. 127. – Rudi [that is, Rudolf Kolisch] attaches great importance to the theme of the ‘Dona nobis pacem’.
[288]
On the Missa. Avoidance of plastic themes, and of negativity, the music paying no attention to the ‘Kyrie’ and the ‘Crucifixus’. By contrast, the ‘Dona’.
[289]
Missa Solemnis. A damming up of expressive means. Expression through archaism; modal elements.
[290]
The division into short sections. Question of form attained not by development but by balance.
[291]
No dynamic structure, but built up in sections, entirely different formal principles than elsewhere in Beethoven. Articulation through vocal entries, reiteration of components of motifs. A different kind of peinture.
[292]
Erosion of harmonic steps, avoidance of dynamics even in harmonic progression.
[293]
The difficulty of the Missa is not that of complexity. Most of it is simple on the surface. Even the fugal sections are homophonic in spirit, with the exception of ‘Et vitam venturi’. (‘Credo’ probably the crux.)
[294]
The outward difficulties are merely vocal, exposed upper register, not unduly complicated.
[295]
A liking for pomp, doubling of brasses.
[296]
The intentionally non-committal themes.
[297]
Humanization and stylization. The sacred receding in favour of the human. Thus in the ‘Kyrie’ of the ‘Homo’; the centre of gravity in the idea of the future; of the ‘Dona’. – Is the aesthetic problem of the Missa that of the levelling down to the universally human? Totality as levelling.
[298]
The archaistic features of the harmony, unique in Beethoven, match the formal archaism.
[299]
Missa, continued. Empty talk about the expansive, novel aspect of the thematic work.
[300]
It might appear after all this that the Missa has been understood. But to recognize the obscure as obscure is not necessarily to understand it; the given characteristics may be confirmed by listening, but do not yet allow us to listen correctly. [301]247
NB: Instead of motivic work a puzzle-like procedure. Succession, grouping around, unvaried motifs.
[302]
The aesthetic fragmentariness of the Missa corresponds, despite the closed surface, to the cracks and fissures in the texture of the last string quartets.
[303]
The tendency to hark back in the late phase of all great composers = limit of the bourgeois mind?
[304]
Repetition of the word Credo, as if he had to convince himself of it. [305]248
The neutralization of culture – the phrase has the ring of a. philosophical concept. It indicates a more or less general reflection on the fact that intellectual formations have lost their bindingness, because they have detached themselves from any possible relationship to social praxis and become what aesthetics has retrospectively credited them with being – objects of purely mental apprehension, of mere contemplation. As such they finally lose their intrinsic, their aesthetic seriousness; with the tension between them and reality their artistic truth also vanishes. They become cultural commodities exhibited in a secular pantheon in which contradictory entities – works that would like to strike each other dead – are given space side-by-side in a false pacification: Kant and Nietzsche, Bismarck and Marx, Clemens Brentano and Büchner. This waxworks of great men then finally confesses its desolation in the uncounted and unconsidered images in every museum, in the editions of classics in covetously locked bookcases. Yet however far awareness of this has spread by now, it is as difficult as ever – if we disregard the fashion for biography which reserves a niche for every queen and every microbe chaser – to define the phenomenon conclusively. For there is no superfluous Rubens whose flesh tints the connoisseur could abstain from admiring, and no poet of the publisher Cotta whose verses, ahead of their time, do not await resurrection. From time to time, however, one can name a work in which the neutralization of culture becomes irrefutable. There is even one which enjoys the highest fame, has its undisputed place in the repertoire, while remaining enigmatic and incomprehensible and, whatever it may conceal within itself, offering no support for the popular acclaim lavished upon it. Such a work is Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. To speak seriously of it can be nothing other than, in Brecht’s phrase, to alienate it; to rupture the aura of unfocused veneration protectively surrounding it, and thereby perhaps to contribute something to an authentic experience of it beyond the paralysing respect of the culture sphere. The attempt to do so must necessarily use criticism as its medium; qualities which traditional awareness uncritically ascribe to the Missa Solemnis must be tested, to prepare for a perception of its content – a task which quite certainly no one has yet performed. The aim is not to debunk, to topple approved greatness for the sake of doing so. The disillusioning gesture which sustains itself on the prominence against which it is directed is enslaved by that very prominence. But criticism, in face of a work of such stature and of Beethoven’s entire oeuvre, can be nothing other than a means of unfolding the work, fulfilment of a duty towards the matter itself, not the gratified sneer at finding one thing less to respect in the world. To point this out is necessary because neutralized culture itself ensures that, while the works are not perceived in an original way but are merely consumed as something socially approved, the names of their authors are taboo. Rage is automatically aroused when reflection on the work threatens to touch on the authority of the person.
Such a reaction must be disarmed at the outset if one plans to say something heretical about a composer of the highest standing, comparable in power only to the philosophy of Hegel and no less great in an age which had irrecoverably lost its historical preconditions. Beethoven’s power, however, which is founded on humanity and demythologization, demands, on its own terms, the destruction of mythical taboos. Moreover, critical reflections on the Missa are very much alive among musicians as an underground tradition. Just as they always knew that Handel was no Bach, or that some questions surround Gluck’s qualities as a composer, while only timidity before established public opinion kept them silent, they also know that the situation regarding the Missa Solemnis is a peculiar one. Little criticism of a penetrating nature has therefore been written about this work. Most of it is content with general professions of reverence for an immortal chef d’oeuvre, and is embarrassed when called upon to say in what its greatness consists; such criticism mirrors, but does not breach, the neutralization of the Missa as a cultural commodity. Hermann Kretschmar, who belongs to a generation of musical historians who did not yet repress the experiences of the nineteenth century, came nearest to allowing himself to be astonished by the Missa. According to his reports, earlier performances of the work, before it was elevated to the official Valhalla, left no lasting impression. He sees the difficulty above all in the ‘Gloria’ and the ‘Credo’, explaining it by the abundance of short musical images which need to be unified by the listener. Here Kretschmar at least names one of the alienating symptoms displayed by the Missa; admittedly he overlooks its connection to the essential qualities of the composition, and therefore believes that the clamping effect of powerful main themes in the two large sections is enough to dispose of the difficulty. That, however, is no more the case than that the listener masters the Missa simply by concentrating at each moment, as one does with the great symphonic movements by Beethoven, on calling to mind what has gone before and thus following the emergence of unity from multiplicity. Its unity is of a wholly different kind to that engendered by the productive imagination in the Eroica and Ninth Symphony. One hardly commits a crime in doubting whether this unity is, as it stands, comprehensible at all.
The historical fate of the work does indeed appear strange. In Beethoven’s lifetime it is thought to have been performed only twice: once in 1824 in Vienna, together with the Ninth Symphony, but incomplete; then, in the same year, complete in St Petersburg. Up to the early 1860s there were only isolated performances; not until more than thirty years after the composer’s death did it attain its present standing. Difficulties of interpretation are hardly sufficient to explain this; while there are some problems in the treatment of voices, in most parts there is no special musical complexity. Contrary to legend, the last string quartets, far more exposed and demanding, were appropriately received from the outset. Moreover, Beethoven, in contrast to his custom, put his authority directly behind the Missa. When he offered it for subscription, he called it ‘l’oeuvre le plus accompli’ – his most successful work. Over the ‘Kyrie’ he placed the words: ‘From the heart – and may it reach the heart’ – a confession one looks for in vain in all the other printed editions of Beethoven. His attitude towards his own work should not be underestimated, nor blindly accepted. Those utterances have an admonitory tone, as if Beethoven had sensed something of the Missa*s unfathomable, elusive, enigmatic quality and were trying to use the force of his will, which otherwise shaped the flow of his music itself, to impose the work from outside on those on whom it could not impose itself. Admittedly, this would be inconceivable if the work did not truly contain a secret which in Beethoven’s eyes legitimized such an intervention in its history. But when it did really find acceptance, the by how unquestioned prestige of its composer is likely to have helped. His main sacred work was praised as the companion-piece to the Ninth Symphony, on the model of the emperor’s new clothes, without anyone daring to voice questions by which they would merely have displayed their own lack of depth.
The Missa could hardly have become established if – like Tristan, for example – it had shocked the audience by its difficulty. That was not the case. If we disregard the occasionally unusual demands on the singers’ voices, which it has in common with the Ninth Symphony, it contains little which does not remain within the confines of traditional musical idiom. Very large sections are homo- phonic, and the fugues and fugati also merge without friction into the thorough bass schema. The harmonic progressions, and thus the surface cohesion, are hardly ever problematic; the Missa Solemnis is composed far less against the grain than the last string quartets or the Diabelli Variations. It does not fall within the stylistic category of the late Beethoven, as derived from those quartets and variations, the five late piano sonatas and the last Bagatelle cycles. The Missa is distinguished by certain archaic moments in its harmony, an ecclesiastical tone, rather than by daringly advanced techniques as in the Grosse Fuge. Beethoven not only always kept the musical genres far more strictly separate than is supposed, but within them he embodied temporally distinct stages of his oeuvre. If the symphonies, despite or because of their rich orchestral apparatus, are in many respects simpler than the great chamber music, the Ninth Symphony falls outside the late style altogether, turning retrospectively towards the classical, symphonic Beethoven, without the edges and fissures of the last string quartets. In his late period he did not, as might be thought, blindly follow the dictates of his inner ear and compulsively neglect the sensuous aspect of his work, but made masterful use of all the possibilities which had grown up during the history of his composing; suppression of the sensuous was only one of them. The Missa has occasional abrupt moments, the omission of transitions, in common with the last quartets, but little else. In general, it displays a sensuous aspect diametrically opposed to the spiritualized late style, a tendency towards pomp and monumentality of sound that is usually absent from Beethoven’s works. Technically, this aspect is embodied in the procedure reserved for moments of ecstasy in the Ninth, when vocal parts are doubled by brass, especially trombones but also horns, which lead the melody. The frequent terse octaves, coupled with deep harmonic effects, have a similar purpose. These are seen typically in the well-known ‘Die Himmel rühmen des Ewigen Ehre’, and decisively in ‘Ihr stürzt nieder’ in the Ninth Symphony – later to become an important ingredient of Bruckner. It was certainly not least these sensuous highlights, a liking for overwhelming sound effects, which gave the Missa its authority and allowed its listeners to disregard their own incomprehension.
The difficulty is of a higher order – it concerns the content, the meaning of the music. It is perhaps easiest to picture what is at issue if we ask whether an uninformed listener could recognize the Missa – leaving aside a few parts – as a work of Beethoven. If it were played to such listeners who had not previously heard anything from it, and they were asked to guess the composer, one could expect surprises. Little as the so-called handwriting of a composer constitutes a central criterion, nevertheless, its absence indicates that something is slightly amiss. If we pursue this question by looking around at Beethoven’s other sacred works, the absence of Beethoven’s handwriting is found again. It is revealing how forgotten these other works are now, and how difficult it is to track down a copy of Christus am Ö Iber g or the by no means early Mass in C major, op. 86. The latter, unlike the Missa, could hardly be attributed to Beethoven even in individual passages or phrases. Its indescribably tame ‘Kyrie’ suggests, at best, a weak Mendelssohn. However, it has many features which recur in the much more ambitious and fully formed Missa, which is conceived on a far larger scale: dissolution into often short parts which are not symphonically integrated; a lack of the striking thematic ‘inventions’ which every other work by Beethoven makes use of; and an absence of long, dynamic elaborations. The Mass in C major reads as if Beethoven had had difficulty in deciding to feel his way into an alien genre; as if his humanism had bridled at the heteronomy of the traditional liturgical text and had delegated its composition to a routine devoid of genius. In groping towards a solution to the riddle of the Missa, one will have to keep in mind this aspect of his earlier sacred music. Certainly, it became a problem which wore down his strength; but it helps somewhat in defining the invocatory nature of the Missa. It cannot be separated from the paradox that Beethoven composed a mass at all; if we understood why he did this, we would no doubt understand the Missa.
It is commonplace to assert that the work went far beyond the traditional form of the mass, importing into it the full riches of secular composing. Even in the volume of the Fischer-Lexikon devoted to music, recently edited by Rudolf Stephan, which disposes of many other conventional views, the work is praised for its ‘extraordinarily ingenious thematic work’. As far as one can speak of any such work in the Missa, it uses a method exceptional in Beethoven of shaking the contents about as in a kaleidoscope and subsequent recombin- ing. The motifs are not altered in the dynamic flow of the composition – it has none – but constantly re-emerge in a changed lighting, yet identical. The idea of a disintegrated form applies at most to the outward dimensions. Beethoven will have thought of this when he considered performance of the work at a concert. However, the Missa does not break through the pre-ordained objectivity of the schema by means of subjective dynamics, nor does it generate totality from within itself as happens in the symphony – precisely by thematic work. Rather, the consistent renunciation of all those things disconnects the Missa from all Beethoven’s other output with the exception of his earlier sacred works. The inner composition of this music, its fibre, is radically different to anything bearing the stamp of Beethoven’s style. It is itself archaistic. The form is not attained through the evolving variation of core motifs, but accumulated addit- ively from sections usually imitative among themselves, in a similar practice to that of Netherlandish composers of the mid-fifteenth century, although it is uncertain whether Beethoven knew of them. The formal organization of the whole is not that of a process with its own momentum, not dialectical, but seeks to be induced by the balance of the individual sections, and finally by contrapuntal clamping. All the strange characteristics are directed towards this. That Beethoven could do without Beethovenian themes in the Missa – for who could quote from it by singing, as from any of his symphonies or Fidelio} – is explained by the exclusion of the principle of development: only where a stated theme is developed, and must therefore remain recognizable in its alteration, is the plastic form needed; the idea of plastic form is alien to the Missa as to medieval music. One need only compare Bach’s ‘Kyrie’ to Beethoven’s: in Bach’s fugue we find an incomparably memorable melody suggesting the image of humanity as a procession dragging itself along, bent under a colossal weight; in Beethoven, complexes with hardly any melodic profile, which trace out the harmony and preclude expression by the gesture of monumentality. The comparison leads to a real paradox. According to a widespread if questionable belief, Bach, summarizing the closed, objective musical world of the Middle Ages, had, if not created the fugue, then at least given it its pure, authentic form. It was as much his product as he was a product of its spirit. He had a direct relationship to it. Hence, many of the themes of his fugues, perhaps with the exception of the speculative late works, have a kind of freshness and spontaneity that is found only in the cantabile inventions of later subjective composers. At Beethoven’s historical hour that musical order had passed away; its lustre had afforded Bach the a priori basis of his composition, and thus a harmony between musical subject and forms which permitted something like a naivety in Schiller’s sense. For Beethoven the objectivity of the musical forms with which the Missa operates is indirect, problematic, a subject of reflection. The first part of his ‘Kyrie’ adopts Beethoven’s own standpoint of harmonious subjectivity; but by being moved immediately within the horizon of sacred objectivity, it, too, takes on a mediated character detached from musical spontaneity: it is stylized. For this reason the simple harmonic opening section of the Missa is more remote, less eloquent that its eruditely contrapuntal counterpart in Bach. This is still more true of the themes of the fugues and fugati in the Missa. They have a quality peculiarly suggestive of quotations, of something based on a model. By analogy with a literary custom widespread in antiquity, one could speak of compositional topoi, of the treatment of the musical moment in terms of latent patterns intended to reinforce the work’s objective claims. This is probably responsible for the strangely intangible quality of these fugal themes, which denies primary fulfilment and also affects their continuation. The first fugal section of the Missa, the ‘Christe eleison’ in B minor, is an example both of this and of the archaistic tone.
The work is altogether as distanced from expression as it is from all subjective dynamism. The ‘Credo’ seems to hurry past the ‘Crucifixus’ – in Bach a main expressive part – although marking it by an extremely striking rhythm. Only at the words ‘Et sepultus est’, that is, at the end of the Passion itself, is an expressive emphasis reached, as if the thought of the frailty of human beings had brought attention back to the Passion of Christ, although the following ‘Et resurrexit’ is not endowed with the pathos which is raised to an extreme pitch in the analogous passage in Bach. Only one passage, which accordingly has become the most famous of the work, forms an exception, the ‘Benedictus’, the main melody of which suspends the stylization. The prelude to it has a depth of harmonic proportions matched only by the twentieth Diabelli Variation. However, the ‘Benedictus’ melody itself, which has been praised not without reason as inspired, recalls the variation theme of the E|, major Quartet op. 127. The whole ‘Benedictus’ calls to mind the custom attributed to late medieval artists, who included their own image somewhere on their tabernacle so that they would not be forgotten. But even the ‘Benedictus’ remains true to the style of the whole. Like the other pieces it is articulated in sections, or ‘intonations’, and the ungenuine polyphony merely paraphrases the chords. This in turn is connected to the deliberately secondary role of themes in the method of composition; this allows the themes to be treated imitatively and yet to be conceived principally in harmonic terms, as suited the basically homophonic consciousness of Beethoven and his age: the archaic style had to respect the boundaries of the musical experience open to Beethoven. The great exception is the ‘Et vitam venturi’ of the ‘Credo’, in which Paul Bekker has rightly seen the core of the whole, a fully developed polyphonic fugue, related in its details and its harmonic shifts to the finale of the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata, and aimed at large-scale development. For this reason it is melodically quite explicit and is heightened to the utmost in intensity and strength. This piece is probably the only one which could be said to disrupt the general pattern, being the most difficult both in complexity and for performance; but through the directness of its effect it is, with the ‘Benedictus’, the easiest to apprehend.
It is no accident that the transcendent moment in the Missa Solemnis relates not to the mystical aspects of transubstantiation, but to the hope of eternal life for humanity. The puzzle posed by the Missa Solemnis is the deadlock between an archaic procedure which implacably sacrifices Beethoven’s achieved techniques, and a humane tone which seems to mock these archaic means. This puzzle, the linking of the idea of humanity to a sombre aversion to expression, might be deciphered by assuming that the taboo which later marked its reception is already detectable in the Missa itself. This taboo concerned the negativity of existence, which is the only deduction to be drawn from Beethoven’s despairing desire for salvation. The Missa is expressive whenever it addresses salvation, where it pleads in a literal sense; the expression is cut off mainly where evil and death are mentioned in the text of the Mass, and through this silence the work bears witness to the impending preponderance of the negative; despair through reluctance to give voice to negativity. The ‘Dona nobis pacem’ takes over the burden of the ‘Crucifixus’. Accordingly, the means carrying expression are held back. What carries expression is not dissonance, or only very seldom, as in the ‘Sanctus’, before the allegro entry of ‘Pleni sunt coeli’; expression is attached, rather, to the archaic, the sequences of scale steps [.Stufenfolgen] characteristic of the old church music, the shudder at what has been, as if suffering were to be transported into the past; what is expressive in the Missa is not the modern, but the very ancient. In it the idea of humanity is asserted, as in late Goethe, only through a desperate, mythical denial of the mythical abyss. It calls to positive religion for help, as if the lonely subject no longer felt able, on its own merits as a purely human being, to calm the rising chaos of the dominance of nature and nature’s rebellion against such dominance. To explain why the highly emancipated Beethoven, who relied entirely on his own intellect, should have felt drawn to the traditional form, it is no more adequate to cite his subjective piety than, conversely, to resort to the vacuous assertion that in the work, which subjects itself to the liturgical purpose with zealous discipline, his religious impulse had broadened beyond dogma to a kind of general religiosity, and that his was a Mass for Unitarians. However, the work suppresses professions of subjective piety in relation to Christology. At the point where the liturgy immovably dictates the words ‘I believe’, Beethoven, as Steuermann has strikingly observed, betrays the opposite of such certainty, repeating the word ‘credo’ in the theme of the fugue, as if the solitary person had to convince himself by the repeated invocation that he really did believe. Nor is the religiosity of the Missa, if we can use that term as it stands, that of someone safely ensconced in the faith, or a world religion of such idealistic nature that it does not require the subject to believe anything. What is at issue for him, expressed in later terminology, is whether ontology, the subjective spiritual order of Being, is still possible at all. He is concerned with saving ontology musically in a state of subjectivism, and his recourse to liturgy is meant to achieve this in the same way as invocation of the ideas of God, freedom and immortality was to do for the critic Kant. In its aesthetic form the work asks what can be sung without deception about the Absolute, and how it can be sung. This gives rise to the shrunken quality which alienates the work and makes it almost incomprehensible – probably because the question it poses is not amenable to a concise answer even in musical terms. The subject in its finitude is still exiled, while the objective cosmos can no longer be imagined as a binding authority; thus the Missa is balanced on an indifference point which approaches nothingness.
Its humanistic aspect is defined by the richness of harmony in the ‘Kyrie’, and extends up to the construction of the closing piece, the ‘Agnus Dei’, which is based on the design of the ‘Dona nobis pacem’, the plea for inward and outward peace, as Beethoven again writes in German above the piece; this breaks out expressively once more after the threat of war allegorically represented by bass drums and trumpets. As early as the words ‘Et homo factus est’ the music is warmed as if by a breath. But these are exceptions: usually the style and tone, despite all the stylization, withdraw towards something unexpressed, undefined. This aspect, the resultant of mutually contradictory forces, is probably the main obstacle to comprehension. Though conceived in terms of undynamic areas, the Missa is not articulated in pre-classical ‘terraces’, but frequently blurs the outlines; often, brief insertions neither emerge into the whole nor do they stand alone; they rely on their proportions to other parts. The style is contrary to the spirit of the sonata, and yet is less traditionally sacred than secular, couched in a rudimentary church idiom retrieved from memory. The relationship to this idiom is as refracted as is that to Beethoven’s own style, in a distant analogy to the standpoint of the Eighth Symphony with regard to Haydn and Mozart. Except in the ‘Et vitam venturi’ fugue, even the fugal parts are not genuinely polyphonic, but neither is a single bar homophonically melodic in the manner of the nineteenth century. While the category of totality, which always has primacy in Beethoven, otherwise results from the inherent motion of the individual moments, in the Missa it is maintained only at the cost of a kind of levelling. The omnipresent principle of stylization tolerates nothing truly particular, wearing down the characters in blank conformity to the rules; these motifs and themes lack the power of the name. The absence of dialectical contrasts, which are replaced by the mere opposition between closed sections, therefore sometimes weakens the totality. This is seen especially in the close of sections. Because no path has been travelled, no resistance of the particular overcome, the trace of arbitrariness is transferred to the whole, and the sections, which no longer lead to a goal that the urge to the particular might have imposed, often end dully, stopping without the warranty of a conclusion. All this, despite the outward vigour, not only creates an impression of something mediated, which is equally remote from liturgical obligation and from free fantasy, but also gives rise to the enigmatic quality which sometimes, as in the short allegro and presto passages of the ‘Agnus’, verges on the absurd.
After all that it might seem that the nature of the Missa, characterized in its peculiarities, has been identified. But darkness is not lightened simply by being perceived as dark. To understand that one does not understand is the first step towards understanding, but not understanding itself. The characteristics indicated may be confirmed by hearing the work, and the attention concentrated on them may prevent disorientated listening, but they alone by no means allow the ear spontaneously to perceive a musical meaning in the Missa – a meaning which, if it exists at all, is constituted precisely by a refusal of such spontaneity. So much, at least, has been established, that the strangeness of the work is not dispelled by the formula that the autonomous composer selected a heteronomous form remote to his inclination and fantasy, and that this prevented the specific unfolding of his music. For clearly Beethoven was not seeking in the Missa, as sometimes happens in the history of music, to legitimize himself in an out-of-the-way genre in addition to his real works, while making no special demands on that genre. Rather, each bar of the work, as well as the unusual duration of the process of composition, bears witness to the most insistent concentration. However, this was directed not at asserting his subjective intention, as in his other works, but at eliminating it. The Missa Solemnis is a work of omission, of permanent renunciation. It already forms part of the efforts of the later bourgeois spirit, which no longer hoped to conceive and express the universally human in the concrete form of particular people and relationships, but by abstraction, by excising the fortuitous, by holding fast a generality which had become insane through reconciliation with the particular. In this work metaphysical truth becomes a residue much as the contentless purity of ‘I think’ does in Kant’s philosophy. This residual character of truth, which abstains from penetrating the particular, not only condemns the Missa Solemnis to being enigmatic but also imparts to it, in the highest sense, a trace of impotence – an impotence less of the mighty composer than of a historical state of the spirit which can no longer or cannot yet say what it here sets out to say.
But what drove Beethoven, the composer of unfathomable richness in whom the powers of subjective production were heightened to the point of hubris, to the point where man becomes Creator, towards the opposite tendency, of self-curtailment? Certainly not his personal psychology which, at the same time as he was writing the Missa, was exploring the opposite tendency to its furthest limit, but a compulsion residing in the music itself which, though resistingly, he obeyed with utmost exertion. Here we come upon a common feature of the Missa and of the last quartets in their spiritual constitution – something which all in common avoid. To the musical experience of the late Beethoven the unity of subjectivity and objectivity, the roundedness of the successful symphony, the totality arising from the motion of all particulars, in short, that which gives the works of his middle period their authenticity, must have become suspect. He saw through the classic as classicism. He rebelled against the affirmative element, the uncritical approbation of Being, inherent in the idea of the classical symphony, the trait which Georgiades called ‘festive’ in his study of the finale of the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony. He must have felt the untruth in the highest aspirations of classicist music: that the quintessence of the opposed motions of all particulars, which are annulled in that quintessence, is positivity itself. At this point he raised himself above the bourgeois spirit, of which his own oeuvre is the highest musical manifestation.
Something in his genius, probably the deepest thing, refused to reconcile in the image what is unreconciled in reality. Musically, this may well have expressed itself in an increasing resistance to splitting themes between voices and to the principle of the development. This is related to the distaste which affected the advanced literary sensor- ium, especially in Germany, with regard to dramatic imbroglios and intrigue – a sublimely plebeian distaste, hostile to the courtly world, which first entered German music through Beethoven. Intrigue in the theatre always has something fatuous about it. Its bustle seems to have been set in motion from above, by the author and his idea, but never quite motivated from below, by the dramatis personae. The bustle of thematic work may have evoked to the mature Beethoven’s ear the machinations of courtiers in plays by Schiller, disguised wives, forced caskets and intercepted letters. It is, in the proper sense of the word, a realistic trait in him which is dissatisfied with tenuously motivated conflicts, manipulated antitheses of the kind which in all classicism generate a totality which is supposed to transcend the particular but in reality is imposed on it as if by a dictate of power. Traces of this arbitrariness are detectable in the resolute shifts occurring in the developments of works as late as the Ninth Symphony. The late Beethoven’s demand for truth rejects the illusion of such identity of subjective and objective, which is almost the same thing as the classicist idea. A polarization results. Unity is transcended, yielding fragmentariness. In the last quartets this is achieved by the abrupt, unmediated juxtaposing of bare axiomatic motifs and polyphonic complexes. The rift between the two, which proclaims itself, turns the impossibility of aesthetic harmony into aesthetic content, failure in the highest sense into a yardstick of success. In its way the Missa, too, sacrifices the idea of synthesis, but it does so by peremptorily debarring from the music a subject which is no longer ensconced in the objectivity of the form but is also unable to generate this form intact from within itself. For its human universality it is willing to pay with the silence, perhaps even the subjection, of the individual soul. That, and not a concession to church tradition or a desire to please his pupil, Archduke Rudolph, is likely to lead us towards an explanation of the Missa Solemnis. Out of freedom the autonomous subject, which knows itself to be capable of objectivity in no other way, cedes to heteronomy. Pseudomorphosis to the alienated form, at one with the expression of alienation itself, is to achieve what is otherwise no longer achievable. The composer experiments with the rigidly bound style because formal bourgeois freedom does not suffice as a principle of stylization. The composition tirelessly checks what can still be filled by the subject, what is possible for him, under a stylizing principle imposed in this way from outside. Rigorous criticism is applied not only to each impulse which might contest the principle, but also to each concrete embodiment of objectivity itself which has degenerated into a Romantic fiction, whereas it should be, even as a skeleton, real, sturdy, devoid of illusion. This twofold criticism, a kind of permanent selection, imposes on the Missa its distanced, silhouettish character: despite the replete sound, it places the work in opposition to sensuous appearance no less rigorously than does the asceticism of the last quartets. The aesthetically fractured quality of the Missa Solemnis, its renunciation of clear structure in favour of a question, of almost Kantian severity, as to what is still possible at all, corresponds, despite the deceptively closed surface, to the open rifts displayed by the fabric of the last quartets. However, the Missa shares the archaizing tendency, which is kept in check even here, with the late style of almost all great composers from Bach to Schoenberg. All of them, as exponents of the bourgeois spirit, reached its limit, without being able to transcend it while using the resources of the bourgeois world; the suffering inflicted by the present forced each of them to fall back on something from the past as a sacrifice to the future. Whether this sacrifice bore fruit in Beethoven, whether the quintessence of omission is indeed the cipher for a fulfilled cosmos, or whether, like the attempts at reconstructing objectivity which followed it, the Missa itself failed, can only be judged once historical and philosophical reflection has advanced, through the structure of the work, into the innermost cells of its composition. However, now that the principle of the musical development has run its course historically and has been overturned, the fact that composition now finds itself obliged to accumulate sections, to articulate ‘fields’ without any thought for the procedure óf the Missa, encourages us to treat Beethoven’s admonitory claim that it was the greatest of his works as more than mere admonition.
From Moments musicaux (GS 17, pp. 145ff) – written in 1957