The Music of Salvation

Raised in a devout Catholic family (albeit that he later seems to have embraced elements of Freemasonry) it is clear that Mozart’s Requiem and his other Mass settings invite not merely ritual devotion, but a deep metaphysical optimism – and reflect music’s capacity to point beyond itself and towards the infinite and the transcendent. 

For Barth, Mozart’s music was fundamentally “common grace”— a revelation of God’s sustaining care for the world and a declaration of divine glory. Moreover, Mozart’s music “does not wish to say anything: he just sings and sounds” yet, “What occurs in Mozart is rather a glorious upsetting of the balance, a turning in which the light rises and the shadows fall, though without disappearing, in which joy overtakes sorrow without extinguishing it, in which the Yes rings louder than the ever-present No.” This simultaneous acknowledgment of darkness and affirmation of light reflects what Barth understood as Mozart’s profound grasp of created reality in its “total goodness,”despite its present fallen condition.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, whose theological aesthetics places beauty at the foundation of theology, as “the form of God’s glory,” held that Mozart’s music manifests this glory with exceptional clarity and, through its beauty, awakens desire for God and thus invites the soul toward transcendent reality. While the late Pope Benedict XVI, describing Mozart’s music as possessing “a luminous” quality that “contains the whole tragedy of human existence” while pointing beyond suffering to redemption.

Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, K 626, which our Choir and Orchestra will perform this Friday evening in a concert form, stands unquestionably as one of Western music’s most profound engagements with mortality, judgment, and redemption. We are profoundly grateful to Mindy Davies and all the members of the Jeffry family, whose generosity has made this performance possible in commemoration of Tom and Blenda Jeffry. 

This work was composed during the final year of Mozart’s life and was left incomplete at his death in December 1791. It has long been held to represent more than a merely liturgical setting of the Latin Mass for the Dead, but rather a complex philosophical and theological meditation on the nature of death itself and humanity’s confrontation with ultimate truth. Arguably much of the Requiem’s power lies in the musical tension it maintains between Enlightenment rationality and spiritual transcendence. Between liturgical convention and powerfully expressive originality, it both merits and invites profound theological reflection and analysis.

Mozart’s  Requiem follows the traditional structure of the pre-Vatican II Roman Rite Requiem Missa pro defunctis (Mass for the Dead) in five primary sections: the Introitus (combining the Introit and Kyrie), the Sequentia (Dies Irae sequence with its subsections), the Offertorium, the Sanctus and Benedictus, and the Agnus Dei with Communio (Lux aeterna). 

It thus both theologically and structurally traces our spiritual journey through life as well as the fundamental Christian understanding of death and judgment. Yet Mozart’s musical treatment transforms this liturgical framework into something uniquely personal and expressive. 

To take but one example, Mozart transforms the complex and historic text of the Dies Irae into a vivid dramatization of uncertainty, and spiritual crisis. The music moves at an urgent tempo, with “scurrying string figures and stern trumpet and drum writing that musically enacts the terror of final judgment.” Moroever the choice of D minor as the work’s primary key carries profound symbolic weight. Medieval and Renaissance musical theory would have associated D minor with the Dorian mode, a key of austere dignity and tragic intensity. Furthermore for Mozart specifically, D minor had become associated with desperate passion and moral transgression as we see in his opera Don Giovanni, where the Commendatore’s descent into Hell is accompanied by the very key and harmonic language that pervade the Requiem. Thus is a theological statement made that final judgment brings not instant reconciliation but rather confrontation with the truth of one’s moral condition. 

Yet there is too, as scholars have carefully noted Mozart’s use of the Tierce de Picardy (the Picardian third) whereby certain movements come to end a minor-key section on a major chord. This device, associated with Baroque compositional practice, has been viewed as an “optimistic gesture,” whereby Mozart asserts a positive theological affirmation despite the weight of darkness that surrounds it with the result that one can see a musical metaphor for grace breaking through human despair.

This is not the place for technical musical analysis but even such brief reflections can serve to prompt important theological and philosophical engagement which naturally brings the work of Jeremy Begbie to mind (See his Theology, Music and Time, 2000). He most helpfully distinguishes between “theology for music” which applies Christian doctrine to illuminate musical practice and “music for theology” which uses the phenomena of music to deepen theological understanding. 

In the light of this latter he argues that the unique properties of music can offer to theology “ways of thinking… frameworks, metaphors—for exploring, clarifying, re-conceiving the dynamics of God’s world and his ways in the world.” Taken together he sees ways of resisting theological instrumentalism, whereby music is reduced to mere illustration of theological conclusions and theological aestheticism within which aesthetic experience is placed higher than theological judgment. 

The profoundly Christian character of his project is grounded in his view that theological engagement with music must flow from revelation and more specifically “the decisive self-communication of God in the history of Israel culminating in Jesus Christ.” Music is seen as a phenomenon that can illuminate aspects of that revelation in ways that are distinctive and non-reducible. A further fundamental point is the incarnational, one which always sees music (always comprised in performance of physical patterns and the constraints inherent in sound waves) as the embodied practice of we created humans and never a mere abstract aesthetic object. 

Begbie stands against those who would treat music as an escape from temporal existence into a timeless realm, since it is inherently and thoroughly embedded in physical time and thus requires duration to unfold – albeit that it does so with its own distinctive aspects of temporality through features such as rhythm, meter, anticipation, and resolution. Nonetheless, there is an important sense in which a melody does enable (and indeed requires) listeners to experience past, present, and future simultaneously (as an act of intellection), since it “is hearing, having heard, and being about to hear, all at once.” And this can offer something of an insight, by way of analogy, to the Christian understanding of the life to come, in the timeless beatific vision which is the vision of God that theologians (going back to Boethius) have spoken of as the “simultaneous and entire possession of eternal life.”

Begbie’s theology of new creation further emphasizes that in Christ, the future has already broken into the present time of our experience. Moreover, we must remember that the resurrection represents not merely a return to original creation but the inauguration of a new redeemed creation which for Begbie is in an important sense “something accessible to the artist already,” though not yet fully realized. Artists and more particularly musicians can be understood to work in the tension between the “already” and “not yet,” as was argued above and thus of creating anticipatory signs of the coming consummation of Christian hope, while acknowledging the present brokenness that is part of our experience of this present fallen world. This eschatological orientation further serves as a counterpoint both to naive triumphalism and a despairing nihilism which thus holds in tension the profundity of hope with realism about our present life and experiences. Indeed God’s beauty can be understood as revealed “most decisively” in the cross and resurrection, where “the mutual self-surrendering love of the Father and Son in the Spirit” is displayed for the world’s healing. 

Authentic Christian art must therefore engage the full range of human experience, including lament and suffering, rather than offer the poverty of easy emotional comfort and sentimentality.

Even these brief reflections illustrate the manifest fact that music can serve as a generative source for theological insight. 

There could be no better point from which to begin such reflections than that occasioned by a performance of Mozart’s Requiem with its ultimately profound witness to creation’s order, redemption’s hope, and the inexhaustible beauty of God’s self-giving love in Christ.