World View of Ludwig v Beethoven

[Robin]

'Missa Solemnis,' a Divine Bit of Beethoven
by Jan Swafford


Question and Answer?
Is the Ninth Symphony a response to the 'Missa Solemnis?'

The Catholic mass which Beethoven called the Missa Solemnis is rarely performed. It's eclipsed by the better-known Ninth Symphony. But taken together, the two works shed light on the composer's spiritual world view.

The Missa Solemnis may be the greatest piece never heard. Nearly 90 minutes long, it requires a large chorus, an orchestra and four soloists. It's impractical for the concert hall and fits far less comfortably into a Catholic church service.

It concludes with a fraught, fragile and unanswered plea for peace amid the drumbeats of war. But the answer comes in the Ninth Symphony, with its chorale finale based on Schiller's "Ode to Joy," written in a time of revolution.

Those words and Beethoven's music call for humankind to kneel before the creator, but for answers to turn to one another. The path to peace, he suggests, is bestowed not from above, but from within us and among us, in universal brotherhood.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5202103

Isn't it curious that this conclusion comes from evaluating the instrumental parts of Beethoven's music?

Here is a peek as to why the question of praise music must include instrumental content.



Robin

 

[mgeoffriau]

So ought we sing hymns with tunes borrowed from folk music, drinking songs, etc. ?

 

[TimeRedeemer]

Several great Renaissance era masses were based on a famous drinking song called the Armed Man.

It was before the Reformation, so, no beer bottles thrown my way please...

 

[py3ak]

Robin,

It is indeed very common for music critics to engage the significance of instrumental music. William Weaver actually has some very good essays in the booklets that accompany the Decca opera recordings with Sutherland. They disagree, of course, but probably not more so that critics of poetry. It is something that tends to amaze me that Plato to Richard Weaver to the commentator Lenski recognize the morality in instrumental music and we, by and large, do not seem to. Ah well, if I go on in this vein someone will argue with me. And perhaps I will be asked for mathematical demonstrations of the meaning of
"Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky
"Like a patient etherized upon a table"