On Beethoven Mass in C and Brahms's Warum ist das Licht gegben
Aficionados of choral music are likely familiar with two monuments of the genre, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem. Today’s program affords us the opportunity to hear three lesser known but revealing works: Beethoven’s first foray into the Mass, the Mass in C Major, op. 86; Brahms’s early Geistlicheslied, op. 30; and his longest a cappella work, Zwei Motteten, op. 74.
In 1807, Prince Nikolaus II Esterházy commissioned a Mass from Beethoven for his wife’s name day, as Beethoven’s one-time teacher Haydn had provided with his magnificent late Masses. In a letter to the Prince, amidst the obsequiousness customarily adopted by composers addressing their patrons, Beethoven admits some anxiety: “I shall hand you the Mass with considerable apprehension since you, most excellent prince, are accustomed to have the inimitable masterpieces of Haydn performed for you.” Beethoven’s apprehension wasn’t misplaced. Hastily prepared performance materials and patchy attendance led to a shambles of a dress rehearsal. Surely the performance fell short of Beethoven’s expectations. It most definitely disappointed the Prince, who asked, “But my dear Beethoven, what have you gone and done now?” Later, in a letter to the Countess Henriette Zielinska, the Prince lambasted the work less ambiguously: “Beethoven’s Mass is insufferably ridiculous and detestable, and I am not convinced that it can even be taken for a righteous work. I am furious and ashamed.”* Imagine! To be fair, Beethoven treated parts of the text in the manner to which the Prince was accustomed (i.e., as Haydn had), with illustrative text painting; splendid fugues to close out the Gloria, Credo, and Osanna; and skillful integration of the solo quartet.
But elsewhere, Beethoven’s innovations confounded the Prince’s expectations and affronted his conservative tastes. “I do not like to talk about my Mass, or, generally, about myself,” Beethoven told his publisher, “but I believe that I have treated the text as it has seldom been treated before.” This might refer to his pioneering approach to motivic development. Notably, to devote time to the Mass, he set aside sketches for his Fifth Symphony—locus of the Beethoven motive par excellence. Just as that famous four-note motive does, some key words in the Mass such as “miserere” and “gloria” gain emphasis and depth through repetition and development. Perhaps this refers to the appearance of some unusual textures: The Kyrie begins with the choral basses, a cappella, and the Sanctus includes a passage for chorus accompanied only by timpani—a bizarre but beguiling combination. Or perhaps this refers to form. The Dona Nobis Pacem sets off with fleet-footed, homestretch alacrity, juxtaposing ebullient exchanges among solo quartet, chorus, and solo woodwinds with flashes of quintessential Beethovenian fire—diminished sonorities punched through with sharp accents. But just when the movement seems to have concluded, the music of the Kyrie reappears, as a coda. It ends as it began.
Ultimately, Beethoven sought not to flatter his patron but to forge an individual path, as a spiritual but not church-going man, into the texts of the Mass. Anyone doubting that Beethoven sought extraordinary specificity need look no further than the nearly oxymoronic tempo designation for the Kyrie: Andante con moto assai vivace quasi Allegretto ma non troppo. Beethoven’s suggestions to the writers crafting a German text to fit his Latin-texted Mass further elucidate his conception: “In general the character of the Kyrie is heartfelt resignation, deep sincerity of religious feeling . . . yet without on that account being sad.” On the work as a whole: “Gentleness is the fundamental characteristic . . . cheerfulness pervades.” Elsewhere he admitted that the “emphasis” was “not on God or princes, but on the human being entering the church.”
Two of the Brahms motets on today’s program were written early in his career, before the Requiem, when he was active as a choral conductor. His sacred choral music from this period betrays a deep interest in the processes of Renaissance polyphony. Brahms published Zwei Motteten in 1878, but its second motet, O Heiland reiss die Himmel auf, was written around 1860. In the course of setting five verses of an advent chorale by Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld, the motet displays Brahms’s formidable contrapuntal skill: the chorale tune is used differently in each verse, ending with canon in inversion in the fifth verse and amen. But of course the music never sounds like an academic exercise; Brahms’s whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. The same can be said of his sublime Geistliches Lied, op. 30, written in 1856 at age twenty-three. This miniature masterpiece renders in music the calming, divinely ordained order implied by its text. The soprano and tenor, and alto and bass parts are exactly the same, separated by the interval of a ninth. Were the voices sounded simultaneously, they would create almost unbearable cacophony. But by layering the voices in canon, each four patient beats after the other, Brahms’s motet unfolds perfectly, in understated grandeur. There is no more effective antidote to Brahms’s “great why,” and there are few—if any—more glorious settings of “amen.”
Brahms composed with the motet Warum ist das Licht gegeben? in 1877 seemingly, in part, to address an acute artistic yearning. When an admirer questioned Brahms about the ominous trombones and timpani in his otherwise sunny Second Symphony, he responded:
I would have to confess that I am. . . a severely melancholic person. That black wings are always rustling above us, and that in my output – perhaps not entirely by chance – that symphony is followed by a little essay about the great “Why.” If you don’t know this [motet] (“Warum”), I will send it to you. It casts the necessary shadow on the serene symphony and perhaps accounts for those timpani and trombones.
As Beethoven did with Haydn and the Mass genre, Brahms adopted and adapted the model of a great master of the motet genre, J. S. Bach. He collected four texts from the Book of Job, the Lamentations of Jeremiah, the Epistle of James, and Martin Luther’s chorale, “Mit Fried und Freud,” and shaped four corresponding musical sections into a rounded arch form. The first and last sections, scored for four voices, are in D minor. The second and third, scored for six voices, form a cohesive center, wherein two passages in F major surround one in C major.
The head of the motet is marked langsam und ausducksvoll (slow and expressively). Brahms establishes “the great why” boldly at the outset, with two outbursts on “warum” (“why?”), first loud, then suddenly soft. Having seized our attention, he slowly uncoils a serpentine, searching fugue subject. As the four parts sequentially slide in, the harmony curls around the circle of fifths and dissonance squeezes nearly every downbeat, darkening the interrogatory, unsettled atmosphere. The first of three additional “Warum?” interjections disrupts the flow. (Each is punctuated with an unresolved leading-tone question mark in the altos). As Job’s questioning intensifies, so too does the music: the distance between imitative entries shortens, while diminished sonorities contract the harmony. To close the first section, Brahms transfigures the fugue subject into a macabre waltz melody, followed again by “Warum?” The second section’s shift away from Job to more positive texts begets a shift from D minor to the warmth of F major and the lilt of compound meter. The middle of this motet, enriched by two additional voices in the texture, is Brahms at his most sumptuous (or as sumptuous as he can be without the aid of the ochre glow of violas and cellos, as in the Requiem). The return to D minor and the sparser four-voice chorale texture in the fourth and final section, by comparison, sounds reserved, antique, almost austere. Brahms’s voice yields to Bach’s.
The outer sections provide representations of two iconic figures in whom 19th-century artists often saw themselves reflected: Job, suffering hero of the Old Testament; and Bach, hero of the German musical tradition. In between, Brahms. What, then, are we to make of this Bach-like chorale? Some see reverent homage, noting that op. 74 was dedicated to the Bach scholar Phillip Spitta. But in fact Brahms asked to rescind the dedication, noting, “Were I to dedicate motets to the music scholar and Bach biographer, it looks as though I think I can create something special and exemplary in the genre, etc. etc.” Perhaps the chorale functions as it might in a Bach motet, ratifying the redemptive effect of Christ in the face of death. Yet neither Christ’s name nor the implication of his mediating, redemptive effect appear in “Warum.” Their conspicuous absence, the mention of Job within the New Testament text Brahms selected, and the return to D minor for the chorale leave the spirit of Job to pervade the whole. The palpable subjectivity and existential questioning animating the Job text is reflected in the subjectivity of Brahms’s music, and suggests a composer still striving, looking at that artistic tradition from the outside, resigned to his own “great why.”
Beethoven wanted his Kyrie to evoke “the human being entering the church.” Where are we going, or where have we gone, when, at the very end of the Mass, the Kyrie music recurs, verbatim? By 1879, Brahms’s success as a composer was not in doubt, but the rustling “black wings” and “shadow” appeared in his letter nevertheless. Who among artists, of any era, hasn’t heard the rustling of such wings, hasn’t felt the chill of such shadows? In 1882, his Third and Fourth Symphony now behind him, Brahms again mentioned his motet and lamented: “in the Book of Job you will find that ‘Warum’—but no answer to it.” How vexing, how engrossing—and how Romantic—to engage with music that leaves us not embracing answers but facing our questions.
* “La messe de Beethoven est insuportablement ridicule et detestable, je ne suis pas convaincu qu’elle puisse meme paroitre honêtement: J’en suis colère et honteux.”