Beethoven's Missa Solemnis

This evening I present passages from Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, on the occasion of its performance tomorrow evening at the American University by the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts. This masterpiece is accounted the most perfect thing man has produced in the field of human creation! It is the greatest masterpiece of the greatest genius... Beethoven completed it in the same year in which he completed the Ninth Symphony, so that that year was, in truth, the bride among the years of humanity.

When he finished it, he said it was the most perfect thing he had produced, and wrote upon it in his own hand: 'From the heart, and to the heart.' From that time to this day it has ranged through the deep heart of humanity, and beneath it stands everything else that a human creature has produced! And although Beethoven was free in composing it, bound by nothing but his own meditations and his personal interpretations of all that is in the Gospels, the masterpiece

is universal, and the longing for it answers in every soul. It consists, like every piece of this kind, of five basic sections. The first is 'Lord, Have Mercy,' in which the chorus joins in four voices, ending in solo song; in it the clarity of the words is often sacrificed for the sake of the general musical design. The second is 'the Praise,' between chorus and singers; despite its joyfulness, the sufferings of Christ appear in it — the wind instruments are used for joy and the brass instruments for suffering, and all the voices share in the one and the other. The third is 'the Creed,' the faith of the apostles, in its varied manifestations and its single essence, and it ends with an 'Amen' that is all the echo of the universe's bells in the valleys at eventide, or that is all peace, bearing the believer up to heaven.

The fourth is the 'Sanctus,' in which comes the advent of the Lord, after the various instruments have shown their art in preparing that unique atmosphere, above all the wind instruments at its beginning and the strings at its end. The fifth, and last, is 'the Lamb of God,' bearer of the sins of the world; in it appear, more than before, the sufferings of Christ and His love for mankind, together with much anxiety and fear; then the brass instruments come forth, heralding the approach of peace of mind; then all of them join with the voices and the rest of the instruments in a great prayer suggesting complete human rest, and in it the piece attains the utmost that souls aspire to.

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If we wish to listen to it, we have only to furnish ourselves with a heart of the kind Beethoven intended, remembering that we are in a lofty atmosphere of beautiful holiness — or holy beauty.