The Catholic Beethoven
by nicholas chong
oxford university, 336 pages, $99
On the cover of Nicholas Chong’s new book, The Catholic Beethoven, the skies are blue. That in itself deserves comment. Images of Beethoven, from his own lifetime and ever since, tend to show the composer against stormy or darkening skies—the wild-haired prophet of the Romantic century. Chong gives us something different: a photograph of Beethoven’s monument in his birthplace of Bonn. Behind it—filling the skyline, its spires pointing heavenwards—is Bonn Minster. It’s a sunlit, optimistic image.
Chong begins his argument in that same cathedral square, where the pedestal that supports Beethoven’s statue is decorated with four allegorical panels representing the four genres of music in which Beethoven’s contemporaries agreed that he excelled. That he was a supreme master of piano music and the symphony, Chong notes, is still undisputed. The third panel represents the dramatic muse, and that’s slightly trickier. Beethoven completed only one opera, Fidelio—a troubled work, whose message of courage and marital fidelity rarely survives undamaged in our cynical century. Still, Beethoven loved it, and opera audiences love it, too, so fair enough.
No, it’s the fourth panel that provides Chong’s jumping-off point: an image of St. Cecilia seated at the organ, representing Beethoven’s mastery of sacred music. To the modern music-lover, the emphasis on sacred music may come as a surprise. Beethoven completed only two liturgical works: his Mass in C of 1807 and the Missa solemnis, which occupied him from 1819 to 1823. By the standards of his era, that isn’t much to set against the eighteen Mass settings Mozart composed during a life that lasted just thirty-five years, or even the fourteen Masses by Beethoven’s famously devout teacher, Haydn. Even if we count the oratorio Christus am Ölberge (1803), sacred music can hardly be said to dominate Beethoven’s compositional output.
Then there is Beethoven’s posthumous reputation as the nineteenth century’s musical Prometheus (the pagan image has been a popular one)—an artistic revolutionary and the avatar of an age that viewed the individual human will as the driving force of the universe. In truth, every generation co-opts great artists into its own self-image, and the preferred model during most of the two centuries since Beethoven’s death has been determinedly anti-establishment. Posters for a Beethoven festival at London’s Barbican Centre in 2020 portrayed him with red hair and a lightning-flash of face-paint. “Iconic before Bowie,” ran the slogan.
Since at least the mid-nineteenth century, there has been a determined and largely successful drive to present Beethoven as a subversive, egalitarian, and essentially secular thinker—“a lifelong Enlightenment radical,” to quote one recent study cited by Chong. Though ideological prejudice is certainly at work, the image of Beethoven as freethinker does contain an element of truth. What music-lover doesn’t know the tale of how Beethoven revoked the Eroica symphony’s dedication to Napoleon upon learning that the former revolutionary had crowned himself emperor? “Now he will trample on the rights of man!” he is supposed to have exclaimed, and the manuscript shows the damage where he scratched out the Corsican’s name.
In religious terms, it has been open season. “Writers do not agree on precisely what label is most appropriate for describing Beethoven’s outlook,” notes Chong:
‘Deist’, ‘pantheist’, ‘universalist’ and ‘humanist’ are some of the common terms employed, despite the fact that these words have quite different meanings. Nevertheless, what unites most accounts of Beethoven’s religious outlook is the assumption that as a child of the Enlightenment, Beethoven was indifferent, possibly even hostile to organised religion, particularly the Catholic Christianity of his birth.
No one who has read any of the standard Beethoven biographies will dispute Chong’s assessment: “The conventional wisdom is thus that Beethoven’s religion was idiosyncratic, unorthodox, individual; not specifically Christian, and certainly not Catholic.”And yet; and yet. A scholar is supposed to deal with evidence. Primary evidence about Beethoven’s beliefs is, as Chong notes, scarce and contradictory. But certain facts remain true—even if, as Chong remarks, “not all biographical accounts draw attention” to them:
The composer was born into a Catholic family. He was baptised a Catholic—the baptismal font survives today in Bonn’s St Remigius Church—and attended a Catholic grade school, the Tirocinium. All his life he lived in a Catholic world. Bonn and Vienna, his two main places of residence, were both Catholic territories. . . . Much of Beethoven’s musical training there took place in local Catholic churches, where he would have become familiar with church music and its place in the Catholic liturgy. At the end of his life Beethoven was given a Catholic funeral. Anton Schindler also reports that on his deathbed, the composer willingly received the Last Rites from a priest.
Living an outwardly Catholic life in a largely Catholic society is not, in itself, evidence of an emotional or intellectual commitment to the faith (though it’s a useful start). But there’s the question of that statue, too, and the image of St. Cecilia. The monument in Bonn was erected in August 1845, on what would have been Beethoven’s seventy-fifth birthday—in other words, by people who had known the composer, and within what might have been his lifetime, had he not died at fifty-six. Clearly, Beethoven’s immediate contemporaries saw his handful of sacred compositions as a meaningful—indeed, a profoundly significant—part of his life’s work.
That’s the paradox Chong addresses in this scholarly, lucid, and quietly courageous book. He sets out to examine the evidence for Beethoven’s faith, and in doing so, tactfully but conclusively dismantles one of the most enduring elements of the “Beethoven myth”: his (supposed) estrangement from Catholicism. “Beethoven’s religious outlook was indeed much more inclined towards the Catholic Church than most accounts have proposed since the middle of the nineteenth century,” Chong asserts. “It will be the task of this book to discover the lost voice of a Catholic Beethoven.”
Chong takes a two-pronged approach. He begins by examining the intellectual and spiritual milieu in which Beethoven lived, painting a picture of a society riven by diverse (but not necessarily antagonistic) philosophical and theological trends. Bonn, in Beethoven’s youth, was a center of the so-called German Catholic Enlightenment, and Chong demonstrates that the term is anything but an oxymoron. He shows how modern perceptions of the Enlightenment have been unduly shaped by the anti-religious extremes of the French Revolution, creating a “false binary” in our understanding of Beethoven.
The German experience was very different from the French. The religious wars of the seventeenth century had left a fear of intolerance in the German-speaking world, where Protestant and Catholic polities co-existed peaceably within the patchwork of small states (well over seventy at the end of the eighteenth century) that made up the ostensibly Catholic Holy Roman Empire. In the German Catholic context, the Enlightenment was seen not as an anti-religious project, but as a specifically Catholic program of reform, rooted in Christian values and driven and embraced by forward-looking clergy who felt that a simplified and shortened liturgy could only benefit their flock.(In a sad irony, Mozart’s rift with his employer, Archbishop Colloredo of Salzburg, had stemmed from Colloredo’s own reformist ideals: The Archbishop’s drive toward a simplified liturgy offered little to a musician with Mozart’s genius for theater.)
In short, Beethoven grew up in circles in which a sincere Catholic faith and a commitment to the ideals of the Enlightenment presented little contradiction. That world changed violently during the course of Beethoven’s lifetime, and Chong is clear-eyed about how Beethoven, like many of his contemporaries, navigated the intellectual eddies and rip currents of post-1789 Europe. In particular, he examines the “Catholic Restoration” of the early nineteenth century—in effect, the Church’s pushback against untrammelled liberalism and (for composers) its reassertion of the more emotive musical idioms that had characterized the sacred music of the baroque Counter-Reformation.
Startlingly (to the secularizers, at any rate), Chong finds Beethoven, in his final decade, in open sympathy with this conservative trend. The colossal Missa solemnis (intended though never used for the consecration of Beethoven’s patron, Archduke Rudolf, as archbishop of Olmütz in 1819) stands as the mightiest testament of Beethoven’s rarely articulated personal faith: a Mass-setting whose sheer scale and difficulty made it unusable, then and now, as part of a reformed and simplified liturgy.
Of course, it’s all a great deal more complex than that. Beethoven, a difficult man at the best of times, seems to have held a series of contradictory philosophical positions. True to the ecumenical ideals of the Catholic Enlightenment, he took immense pains over a German translation for his Mass in C and expressed the hope that it would be used by Protestants as well. A simple question of maximizing his sales? Not so, points out Chong: When his publisher refused to purchase the rights, Beethoven offered him the Mass for free. He was determined that it should be heard and used in worship—even if the gesture left him out of pocket.
Christus am Ölberge, meanwhile, was written in German and premiered in a public theatre, a thoroughly reformist approach to a sacred narrative. And yet its emotional heart is an intensely expressive depiction of the inner struggle of a figure who is wholly absent from most secularist descriptions of Beethoven’s faith: Christ, depicted (in Chong’s words) “not just as a model for virtuous conduct, but as a person with whom the believer should connect in an intimate manner.”
In this, Beethoven echoed the teaching of the Catholic Restoration theologian Johann Michael Sailer (1751–1832), several of whose books he owned (and annotated) and whose morals impressed him so deeply that he made concrete (though unfulfilled) plans to have his nephew Karl educated by Sailer. Chong devotes a chapter to Beethoven’s personal involvement with Sailer and examines Beethoven’s small but apparently well-thumbed theological library in some detail. Whatever else he might have been, Beethoven was not a man who dismissed or disregarded current religious thinking. Instead, Chong shows a lively and knowledgeable engagement with contemporary—and specifically Catholic—religious thought.
And then, of course, there’s the evidence of the music itself—the other wing in Chong’s strategic encirclement of the Secular Beethoven myth. Chong gives a detailed study of the genesis, form, and meaning of Beethoven’s three major sacred works, illustrated with musical examples. As with any musicological argument, much of this is in the nature of showing one’s work, but every example seems pertinent, and readers with an average level of musical literacy should find the technicalities manageable.
Equally, you could skip past them to the conclusion, though in doing so you’ll miss a uniquely perceptive account of the vast sacred mysteries of the Missa solemnis. Chong points out that the dark, chromatic orchestral Präludium before the Benedictus directly echoes the organ improvization that traditionally occurred in church during the preparation of the Eucharist; he notesthat Beethoven’s sublime violin solo (which follows immediately, at the start of the Benedictus) descends from the heights at the very moment in which the elements would be consecrated. The violin, in its intense purity and sweetness, represents the presence of Christ at the instant of transubstantiation. This is emphatically not music created in isolation from its ecclesiastical context; rather, it’s the work of a composer with a real and sympathetic awareness of Catholic ritual.
So there it is: The designers of the statue were correct. The small number of Beethoven’s explicitly Catholic compositions gives us no sense of those works’ scope, or the importance that Beethoven attached to them. And it conceals the extent to which a Christian and Catholic understanding informed other aspects of his life and work. Is it really such a stretch to believe that when Beethoven included a wordless “song of thanksgiving” in his String Quartet Op.132, he was not addressing the universe at large? As Chong’s argument unfolds, it seems increasingly clear that if the Catholic Beethoven has indeed been hiding, he’s been hiding in plain sight.
Certainly, I wouldn’t want to be without Chong’s brief but illuminating survey of Beethoven’s modest catalogue of religious songs. Many of these songs use texts by the Protestant Christian Gellert (1715–1769)—the Catholic Enlightenment showing its tolerance, again. (Haydn, the most committed of Catholic churchgoers, was a fellow admirer of Gellert.) One detail in particular leaps out from Chong’s analysis. In Der Wachtelschlag (1803, to words by the poet Samuel Sauter), a brief rhythmic figure imitates the call of a quail, set to the words “Liebe Gott!.”Five years later the same figure recurs, without words but otherwise unchanged, in the magical birdsong cadenza that concludes the slow movement of the Pastoral symphony.
A charming bit of pictorialism—and nothing more? It has suited generations of commentators to assume so, and this despite the fact that Beethoven originally described the symphony’s finale as a song of thanks “an die Gottheit.” “Such a Beethoven,” remarks Chong, “does not fit into a perception of history that is dominated by a secularisation theorem claiming that the progress of humankind is in fact to be measured by the rejection of religion.” After reading this book, one struggles to see Beethoven fitting into that limited—and limiting—perspective ever again.
© C.Stadler/Bwag
