Missa Solemnis Research Articles

“The Tremendous Products of a Son of the Gods.” Missa solemnis (Op. 123), Overture (Op. 124), and Ninth Symphony (Op. 125)

“The Tremendous Products of a Son of the Gods.” Missa solemnis (Op. 123), Overture (Op. 124), and Ninth Symphony (Op. 125)

Kamau Brathwaite, a Memoir

This essay tracks Kamau Brathwaite’s life, his poetic and critical writing, and his travails and thinking, from youth and early career—in Barbados, England, Ghana, and the Caribbean, but mainly from his arrival at New York University in 1991—through his retirement in 2013 and return to Barbados, up to his death in 2020. It especially follows Kamau from his low “time of salt” of the late 1980s in Jamaica through the stunning critical and poetic burgeoning from the 1990s on, with such works as Barabajan Poems; the two-volume MR; the prize-winning Born to Slow Horses; and Elegguas and his unpublished third poetry trilogy, Missa Solemnis, Rwanda Poems, and Dead Man Witness, commemorating and trying to rise beyond what he called his “cultural lynching.” The essay looks at Brathwaite’s online/print Sycorax voice and the politico-philosophico-cultural concept of tidalectics that he developed over these years to create an ongoing Caribbean-based decolonizing of mind, spirit, and material life.

Beethoven’s Theologian: Johann Michael Sailer and the Missa solemnis

Abstract This article investigates Beethoven’s connection to the Bavarian Catholic theologian Johann Michael Sailer (1751–1832), the importance of which has been understated or misunderstood in the existing Beethoven literature. Drawing on historical studies of the complex relationship between Catholicism and the German Enlightenment, it provides a detailed and nuanced account of Sailer’s theology, situating it within the fierce debates that took place among German Catholics in this period. The article goes on to examine the contents of three books by Sailer in Beethoven’s possession, and to show how key ideas in these books resonate with features of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, which he worked on around the time he was exposed to Sailer’s ideas. In conclusion, the article argues that a deeper understanding of Sailer and his possible influence on Beethoven should prompt a reconsideration of long-standing assumptions regarding the composer’s religious outlook, which may have been more sympathetic to Catholicism than has previously been supposed.

Sacrosanctity or Duty? The Reception of Beethoven’s Fidelio in the Context of the Cultural-Political Situation in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century in Pressburg

Staging Beethoven’s Fidelio in the second half of the nineteenth century in Pressburg drew on a long- standing Beethoven tradition prevalent in the town. Also, it stood at the center of protests against the growing influence of Hungarian theater in the newly constructed theater building since Fidelio was performed always at a time when the renewal of an agreement with a German-speaking director was being decided on (1889, 1892, 1895). The opera was staged with the participation of the choral societies and musical associations of the town. Its performances were held close to the annual festive masses of the most well-known association of Pressburg, the Church Music Association of St. Martin’s Cathedral (Germ. Kirchenmusikverein bei der Dom-, Kollegiats- und Stadtpfarrkirche zu St. Martin, Hung. Szent Márton Pozsonyi Egyházi Zeneegylet), where Beethoven’s Missa solemnis was performed. This enhanced the efforts of the supporters of the German theater to call Beethoven’s œuvre a carrier of “true art” and humanism and use it as a symbol of cultural identity in the discussions led about preserving the German season in the Municipal Theater (Germ. Stadttheater, Hung. Városi Színház).

A Commentary on Samuel Beckett’s What Where

Aesthetic form is a figure moving through a rain storm, an image perhaps from Susanne Langer, one illuminatingly apposite to Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of form, drawn from the idea of determinate negation—though Adorno never would have provided so open-handed an image. But Langer and Adorno’s thinking in any case derives ensemble from what is a secret to no one who has ever thought about it, as is easily documented in a pinch by thousands of years of Neoplatonists. And if that one insight is commonly given with or without philosophical qualification, the problem of the perception, presentation, and comprehension of that movement—which is anything but a fact, except in the etymological sense of being a deed, and may not be there to be seen at all—its critical discernment, hardly amounting to yea or nay, inevitably runs up against the puzzle that it can neither be imitated or simply discussed. Though without an element of each, and not as if they might just be stirred together, what is at stake is failed. But whatever the difficulties involved, and they are necessarily insuperable, what is first of all important, so far as this commentary on Samuel Beckett’s What Where is concerned, is that Beckett himself found this, his last work for the theater, on stage a failure. All the same, the sense in which this work is Beckett’s Tempest is the reason for this close commentary of the work’s stage script. The intention here, then, is the reverse of Adorno’s essay on Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, which was a labor in the disillusionment of a reputed masterpiece (Alienated Masterpiece). It should be noted, incidentally, that the discussion of the Westminster Chimes, which here figures centrally, is not a claim to establish the work’s origins but an aspect of that problem of presentation, already mentioned. So far as the origin of this essay goes, however, it is written in memory of Rolf Tiedemann (1932–2018) in appreciation of his magisterial editions of the collected works of Adorno and Walter Benjamin, his life work.

A Romantic salon

This selection of Romantic chamber music runs from Beethoven to Brahms, from pianistic poetry to glittering ensemble works, and from the intimacy of the salon to the show-stopping brilliance of the concert stage. Wending our way past familiar stalwarts and novel finds becomes a welcome journey through the 19th century. We begin with Ludwig van Beethoven: Complete works for cello and piano (Resonus res10254, issued 2020, 148′) from Robin Michael and Daniel Tong, which offers up Beethoven’s works performed here on modern copies of period instruments as an opportunity to ‘reassess’ the development of Beethoven’s compositional style. The liner notes point out ways in which innovations associated with Beethoven’s larger pieces (for example the First, Fifth, Sixth and Ninth Symphonies and the Missa Solemnis) are prefigured in these sonatas and variation sets; despite setting out to trouble the received understanding of Beethoven’s ‘three periods’, they end up reinforcing that...

Вторая мировая война в зарубежной музыке. К 75-летию Победы

Everybody is well familiar with the musical chronicles of World War II created by Soviet composers, which are exclusively significant in their artistic merits. But usually our perceptions of what was written in the 1940s by composers outside of Russia are not so concise. The list of such works is significantly high and, just like in Russian music, the most important positions were held by the genre of the symphony: Arthur Honegger’s Second Symphony, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fifth Symphony, Roy Harris’ Fifth Symphony, Bohuslav Martinu’s Third Symphony, as well as programmatic works in the genre – Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s “Tragic Symphony,” Josef Stanislaw’s “Red Army Symphony,” Max Rubin’s “War and Peace Symphony,” Henri Sauguet’s “Expiatory Symphony,” Arthur Honegger’s “Liturgical Symphony,” etc. Musical compositions in various choral and vocal-symphonic genres were broadly represented: Luigi Dallapiccola’s “Canti di prigionia,” Darius Milhaud’s “Cantate de la guerre,” Goffredo Petrassi’s cantata “Coro di morte,” Vít Nejedlý’s cantata “Tobě Rudá Armádo,” Ernst Krenek’s “Cantata for Wartime,” Francis Poulenc’s “Figure Humaine,” Alfredo Casella’s “Missa Solemnis ‘Pro Pace’,” Paul Hindemith’s “Requiem ‘For Those We Love,’” Arnold Schoenberg’s “A Survivor from Warsaw,” etc. This multitude of mentioned and unmentioned compositions must be joined by two outstanding musical scores created by our compatriots who lived at that time in the USA: Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances” and Igor Stravinsky’s “Symphony in Three Movements.” The first of them was being created when the world was just immersing into the abysm of the catastrophe – particularly this poignantly topical situation determined the directedness of Rachmaninoff’s conception, which may be defined by the paradigmatic phrase “war and peace.” Stravinsky’s symphony was written at the end of World War II, when the wartime harvesting campaign had to a certain extent already become the habitual destiny for the planet, so the composer brings out to the forefront the idea that “war is work,” or, in other words, “a la guerre comme a la guerre.” Keywords: World War II, its chronicles in the music of composers outside of Russia, Rachmaninoff's “Symphonic Dances,” Stravinsky’s “Symphony in Three Movements.”

The “from despair to immortality of soul” concept in the interpretation of Beethoven’s Sonata op.111

The research subject is Beethoven’s view of life of the late period - the topical issue for a performing musician: without understanding of the fundamental changes in his style, it is impossible to adequately interpret the late piano sonatas. The last of them - Sonata op.111 - has been an object of discussion not only among musicians, but also among writers for almost two centuries. The author detects the following types of dialogue in Sonate op.111: a) a dialogue with Beethoven’s previous compositions; b) a dialogue - within the latest period - with Ninth Symphony op.25 and Missa Solemnis op.123; c) a dialogue with the music of predecessors; d) an imaginary dialogue of Beethoven and Goethe (of the period of “Faust” completion); e) a dialogue op.111 with the world culture. The author arrives at the following conclusions: whilst the formation of the concept of interpretation is usually related to the performance activities of romanticists - Paganini and List, the prerequisites of the phenomenon of interpretation can be found already in the works and ideas of Beethoven - he is a precursor of romanticists of the 19th century. Each of his works is individualized, and doesn’t contain patterns or cliches. To play his compositions outside of the concept means to be not able to adequately convey the spirit of Beethoven’s music. With all their strict architectonics, Beethoven’s works appeal to spontaneity of self-expression - a pianist, as an actor, should experience this music “in the here and now”.   

Spontini and the City: Bach and Musical Politics in Berlin

In April 1828, Gaspare Spontini conducted a concert spirituel at the Berlin Opera that included sections of the Credo from J. S. Bach's Mass in B minor and the Kyrie and Gloria from Beethoven's Missa solemnis. Spontini was Italian by birth, had conquered Parisian opera houses, and was at the time Generalmusikdirektor of the Berlin Opera. Amidst turbulent controversy and consequent intrigues, Spontini's decision to pair Bach and Beethoven on the program encoded the concert with an overt political statement—the two giants of German music would be viewed in the context of the wider nationalistic politics surrounding German music in general and opera in particular in the first half of the nineteenth century. This essay places Spontini's concert in the context of the early nineteenth‐century Bach revival that preceded Mendelssohn's much anticipated performance of the St. Matthew Passion by almost a year.

ДИАЛОГ МУЗЫКИ И ЛИТЕРАТУРЫ В ТВОРЧЕСТВЕ ОЛДОСА ХАКСЛИ

The article analyzes the musical symbolism in Aldous Huxley’s works in the context of the author’s worldview in its evolution. The “musical constituent” of Aldous Huxley’s works is reflected both in the abundance of musical appeals, references, allusions, direct descriptions of musical performances (in the ekphrasis-like way) and in the text structure of the novel Point Counter Point (1928) organized according to the musical principal of counterpoint. The music of Mozart (Quintet in G-minor), Beethoven (Missa Solemnis, Quartet in A-minor) and Bach (Suite in B-minor, Brandenburg Concerto No. 4) plays a peculiar symbolic role in Aldous Huxley’s works. In his earlier writings these musical masterpieces symbolize a possible alternative to the universal chaos and the absolute existential uncertainty, and in this quality Quintet in G-minor has an important sense-making function in Huxley’s Antic Hay (1923), transforming through the complicated interaction of meanings and associations into the universal anthropological conclusion about the humanity. The plot of the Point Counter Point’s is organized in many aspects as the motion from Bach’s music at the beginning of the novel to Beethoven’s music at the end. In Huxley’s later works, in particular, in his latest utopian novel Island (1962) the role of Bach’s music, namely Brandenburg Concerto No. 4, reveals itself more ambivalent. This music is concurrently a symbol of the highest perfection, a background for the universal horror, and to some extent even something blessing this universal horror in the name of culture (the march of insects to the accompaniment of Brandenburg Concerto No. 4). It is noteworthy that the musical masterpieces treated in this article are also mentioned in Huxley’s letters in the similar sense.

On Style in Beethoven's Missa Solemnis

On Style in Beethoven's Missa Solemnis

The Cosmopolitan Circles of Miguel Covarrubias

Previous articleNext article No AccessCommentariesThe Cosmopolitan Circles of Miguel CovarrubiasCarolyn KastnerCarolyn Kastner Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Art Volume 30, Number 1Spring 2016 Sponsored by the Smithsonian American Art Museum Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/686544 Views: 670Total views on this site © 2016 by The Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

“A Way of Seeing”: Felrath Hines’s Postwar Paintings

2 Felrath Hines, Missa Solemnis, 1950. Reproduced from Floyd Coleman and Holliday T. Day, Felrath Hines (Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1995), 23. Estate permission courtesy Dorothy C. Fisher, widow of Felrath Hines In the years since his death, (Samuel) Felrath Hines’s large, abstract canvases have garnered much-deserved attention. Scholars and critics hail Hines as a sensitive artist, mentioning his smaller nonrepresentational paintings of the 1940s, and then turning to his best-known work: the carefully calibrated geometric abstractions of luminous color he made beginning in the 1970s (fig. 1). The nearly exclusive focus on his nonobjective painting supports the narrative that Hines was an inevitable abstractionist whose interests furthered and expanded the traditions of De Stijl, color field painting, and op art. Art historians have recovered Hines, endeavoring to fold him into the rising tide of abstract expressionism at mid-century and, in particular, what Irving Sandler termed after the fact, “the triumph of American painting.”1 Hines did live in Manhattan from the 1940s until the early 1970s, and he, an African American, may be productively discussed as part of the “other” New York School that included non-white, female, and gay modernist painters who did not circulate in the Cedar Bar or Studio 35 orbits.2 This essay does not seek to dispute or refute the impulse to add Hines’s abstract painting to the inventory of the New York School. Instead, it focuses on one of the artist’s mid-century figurative works, Missa Solemnis (fig. 2) and situates this canvas, which has since disappeared, within period debates about what, precisely, made a work of art “modern.” Asked, toward the end of his life, what he had been trying to achieve when he began painting nonobjectively, Hines responded: “I always tried to do something that has to do with a way of seeing. I always have had an interest in knowing if people saw what I saw.”3 Rather than regard Missa Solemnis as a run-up to the project of abstract art making, we might consider Hines’s earlier production as a “way of seeing,” too, one he shared with a number of more celebrated figurative expressionists in the years right after World War II.4 American figurative expressionists of the 1930s and 1940s, indebted to the blunt mark making, distorted forms, and the bold colors of post-impressionist European expressionism, were recognized for paintings that were seen as creative, emotional, and deeply personal.5 Today’s dominant histories of “A Way of Seeing”

After Mahler: Britten, Weill, Henze, and Romantic Redemption by Stephen Downes (review)

Reviewed by: After Mahler: Britten, Weill, Henze, and Romantic Redemption by Stephen Downes Matthew Mugmon After Mahler: Britten, Weill, Henze, and Romantic Redemption. By Stephen Downes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. [xiv, 276 p. ISBN 9781107008717 (hardcover), $99; ISBN 9781107453562 (ebook), $79.] Music examples, bibliography, index. As Julian Johnson suggested in his landmark study Mahler’s Voices, Gustav Mahler’s emotionally charged and discursively fractured works are often understood as having navigated a transition from romanticism to modernism. “Mahler’s music continues to fascinate us,” Johnson wrote, “in part, because it is caught between two aesthetics, one that presents musical expression as if it went directly ‘from the heart to the heart’ (as Beethoven hoped for the Missa Solemnis) and one that dwells (playfully or ironically) on its own element of artificiality and fabrication” (Mahler’s Voices: Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies [New York: Oxford University Press, 2009], 102). Johnson was careful, however, to point out that these “aesthetics” share more than they might seem to at first. “But it would be unhelpful to imagine that this defines the difference between an essentially romantic aesthetic and a modernist one, though that has some usefulness: unhelpful,” he wrote, “because while the early romantics were preoccupied with the idea of irony, the early modernists were equally preoccupied with the idea of expression. His music makes clear that the romantic and the modern are shaped by essentially the same tension” (ibid., p. 102). As Johnson suggested, the boundaries between romanticism and modernism are not so clear. Recently, Peter Franklin collapsed them further. In his enlightening new book, Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music, Franklin wrote that “Mahler keeps faith with the Romantic dream that . . . embraced the disillusionment and denial that were always a part of it, that represented the rational or waking side of Romanticism” (Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music: Singing Devils and Distant Sounds [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014], 19). Taking aim at standard evaluations of “late Romantic” music as self-indulgent and over blown (and thus easily dismissed), Franklin suggested that “Instead of seeking ‘modernist’ impulses in the music of late-Romanticism (prejudged otherwise to be a manifestation of ‘decadence’ or ‘maximalism’), we might, for example, propose that official European Modernism was itself a late manifestation of Romanticism” (ibid., p. 23). This relaxing of boundaries between romanticism and modernism—highlighted especially by Richard Taruskin’s argument [End Page 694] that modernism’s “beliefs and practices . . . are all maximalizations of a nineteenth-century inheritance” (Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance [New York: Oxford University Press, 1995], 10)—sets the stage for Stephen Downes’s new book, which invests in a newly energized vision of Mahler as romantic and charts its legacy into the twentieth century. This reflects a shift from an earlier study, Music and Decadence in Euro pean Modernism: The Case of Central and Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). There, Downes considered musical decadence as a pathway to modernism, in a sense saving late-romantic music by locating its modernist bona fides. On Scriabin, for instance, he wrote that, “out of mannerism and decadence emerge miniature documents of the New Music, compressed expressions of the avant-garde” (ibid., p. 228). In After Mahler, Downes redeems late-romantic music in a different way—by taking it at face value, as a form of romanticism. Specifically, he examines Mahler alongside three twentieth-century composers—Benjamin Britten, Kurt Weill, and Hans Werner Henze—who, like Mahler (and many other composers), stand astride typical aesthetic categories like “romantic” and “modern.” Downes selected them because of their “profound concern for how music might evoke—through both affirmation and negation—a redemptive or transcendent mode that so preoccupied the Romantics but which seemed, to many of their contemporaries, to be indisputably redundant, dismissible, or disreputable” (p. 3). Their music, he writes, is “after Mahler” because for them, Mahler “probed the possibility of fulfillment or redemption, an ambition manifest in ambiguous tonal, temporal and formal processes” (p. 3). In other words, romanticism thrived in the musical work of these composers—a crucial point that forces us to consider how much of what tends to be valued in twentieth-century music is really nineteenth...

Muzykalia gidelskie w ujęciu historycznym, dydaktycznym i artystycznym

This article concerns archival musical manuscripts which belonged to a musical ensemble active in the Dominican Priory in Gidle (Poland) during the years 1615 to 1915.First, the collection of manuscripts is briefly presented, with special attention to quantity, condition and typology. The oldest preserved compositions from the period 1754 to 1799 are described and their authors identified.In the second part, the article demonstrates how the study of this collection can contribute to knowledge of late Classical and early Romantic music. An analysis of the manuscript Missa solemnis by the French composer François-Adrien Boieldieu serves as a case study. This musical composition has not been listed in catalogues of Boieldieu’s works.The third part of the article focuses on the question of how archival works of music can be adapted for contemporary liturgy and included in the repertoires of choirs and musical ensembles.

Suspended Time: The Fugue on “et vitam venturi saeculi” in the Credo of the Missa solemnis

Even though Beethoven considered his Missa solemnis to be his greatest work, analysts, historians, and philosophers of music have found it difficult to reconcile the composer's use of historical styles and genres—including stile ecclesiastico, plainchant, and falsobordone, in addition to fugue—with the work's position as a late work. In the Credo in particular, Beethoven composes according to the text, using different music and textures for passages describing the tenets of Christian faith than he does for the narrative parts of the text. Studying the materials and the working out of the fugue set to the words “Et vitam venturi saeculi, Amen” shows that this Credo contrasts different levels of compositionally formed time as an expression of timelessness and eternity—essentials of Christian faith.

The Bjorling sound: a recorded legacy

The Bjorling Sound: A Recorded Legacy. By Stephen Hastings. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012. xvii, 406pp (hardcover). ISBN 978-1-58046-406-2. $49.95 Stephen Hastings' The Bjorling Sound is the first attempt at an analytical study of the recordings of the Swedish singer, arguably the greatest lyric tenor on record. The Bjorling Sound is not a discography and, as such, does not attempt to document Bjorling's complete recorded output. Harald Henrysson's A Jussi Bjorling Phonography remains the definitive discography of the tenor, either in its second printed edition (Stockholm: Svenskt Muskhistoriskt Arkiv, 1993), or in the updated version available on the websites of the Swedish Jussi Bjorling Society (www.jussibjorlingsallskapet.com) and the Jussi Bjorling Museum (www.borlange.se/jussibjorling-english). Although the online versions have kept abreast of recent CD releases, Henrysson now lists only CD reissues. For original 78-, 45- and 33*/3-rpm catalog numbers, the printed second edition remains indispensable (the online version does list 78-rpm matrix numbers). The twenty-four chapters that make up the bulk of The Bjorling Sound are arranged alphabetically by composer. Not surprisingly, those devoted to composers whose operas were recorded complete by Bjorling are the longest; ninety-one pages are devoted to Verdi and seventy-eight to Puccini. Bjorling made eleven commercial opera recordings, one each of Puccini's Manon Lescaut, La Boheme, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, and Turandot, Verdi's Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and Aida, and Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci, plus two of Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana. Except for Madama Butterfly and Turandot, where no live performances with Bjorling exist, Hastings adds the known live performances to his discussions--five in the case of Il Trovatore. Of considerable importance are live performances of operas that are not part of Bjorling's commercial discography, including Gounod's Faust and Romeo et Juliette, and Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera and Don Carlo. Major non-operatic works are also added to the mix: Beethoven's Missa Solemnis (the 1940 broadcast with Toscanini and the NBC Symphony), and three performances of Verdi's Messa da Requiem, including the Decca commercial recording from 1960 with Reiner and the Vienna Philharmonic, plus the familiar 1940 Toscanini/NBC broadcast and an alternate Toscanini performance given at the Lucerne Festival in 1939, the last existing only in a primitive recording of a short-wave broadcast. In addition to analyses of the complete performances, Hastings offers discussions of recordings of individual arias and scenes. Many of the recordings in this category are from operas that Bjorling did not record complete, including Meyerbeer's L'Africaine, Massenet's Manon, Bizet's Carmen, and Donizetti's L'Elisir d'amore. Song literature was an important part of Bjorling's repertoire, and is covered in separate chapters to Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Richard Strauss, Sibelius, Grieg, Rangstrom, and Alfven. Hastings has a thorough knowledge of the work and recordings of the major singers of the twentieth century allowing him to make meaningful, and often very specific, comparisons between Bjorling's recordings and those of other important tenors. Throughout his discussions, the level of detail is often exhaustive. One of many examples of Hastings' thoroughness is the section devoted to Bjorling's 1951 recording of the Act II duet from Verdi's Otello with Robert Merrill. He devotes nearly five pages to this recording, drawing comparisons to Caruso, Martinelli, Zenatello, del Monaco, Zanelli, Lauri-Volpi, Vinay, McCracken, Domingo, and Pavarotti. Leaving no stone unturned, he also offers comments on Francesco Tamagno's unpublished 1903 recording of the duet with an unidentified baritone (possibly Tamagno's brother Giovanni). This recording can only be heard in Historic Masters' collection of seven double-faced vinyl 78s devoted to Tamagno's complete 12-inch records (reviewed by me in the ARSC Journal, 2008;39[1]:169-172). …

Beethoven's chamber music in context

Beethoven's Chamber Music in Context provides professional and amateur musicians, and music lovers generally, with a complete survey of Beethoven's chamber music and the background to each individual work - the loyalty of patrons, musicians and friends on the one hand; increasing deafness and uncertain health on the other. Attention is paid to the influence of such large-scale compositions as the Eroica Symphony and Fidelio on the chamber music of his middle years and the Missa Solemnis and the Ninth Symphony on his late quartets. The author also lays stress on Beethoven's ever-increasing freedom of form - largely a result of his mastery of improvisation and a powerful symbol of the fusion of classical discipline with the subversive spirit of romantic adventure which characterises his mature music. Beethoven's friends were not shy about asking him what his music meant, or what inspired him, and it is clear that he attached the greatest importance to the words he used when describing the character of his compositions. 'The tempo is more like the body,' he wrote when commending Malzel's invention of the metronome, 'but these indications of character certainly refer to the spirit.' Angus Watson, a violinist and conductor, has been Director of Music at Stowe School, Winchester College and Wells Cathedral School, one of Britain's specialist music schools. From 1984-1989 he was Dean of Music at the newly founded Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts.

Music, Psychotherapy, and the Soul

The author draws upon the experience of singing Beethoven's Missa Solemnis to explore the feeling states aroused by religious choral music, especially the Mass. He relates them to working with patients in psychotherapy around issues of dying, death, the "oceanic feeling" of the religious experience, the human quest for knowledge, and yearning for an eternal, intelligent, and all-knowing entity in the ultimate reality.

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

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.