Between Pastoral and Nature: Beethoven's Missa Solemnis and the Landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich

Abstract

Although Beethoven's choice of topics in his Missa Solemnis has been largely glossed over, it plays an important role in the dramatic construction and symbolic meaning of the Benedictus. The movement is governed by a pastoral idiom, but the connotative meaning of this idiom is transformed through the appearance of other topics. Its dramatic introduction and combination of “procession” music, canonic process, and cadenza-like gestures complicate its over-arching topic and create a newly heterogeneous pastoral form. Beethoven's topic reveals a poetic conceit that is at once religious, secular, and humanist. The painter Caspar David Friedrich was also engaged by a Kantian epistemological framework. The divine imagery in his landscapes is reinterpreted by its narrative and dramatic context. In Beethoven's Benedictus, the solo violin is the custodian of the pastoral imagination. Likewise, painterly recession from darkness to lightness is mediated by Friedrich's subjects, whose presence indicates both distance and self-referential absorption in the natural.