A Variation – Beethoven’s God/Faith/Spirituality

I was profoundly affected by the sight and the sounds of the deaf composer, Ludwig van Beethoven, struggling through that evening at the grand Congress concert in the Hofburg in November 1814; unable to hear his creations, ‘giving in’ to Michael Umlauf while fumbling through the pages of his manuscripts.  I had an inkling, a sort of resonant feeling in my body, even at this initial time of my introduction to the ‘maestro of Vienna’, that the music of Beethoven was destined to change the cultural soundscape of Europe for all time.  And the years have confirmed this.

I sensed in this unconventional musician a groundbreaking advance in the understanding and expression of suffering.  In the following years, his later works such as his late String Quartets (which I have played countless times), his Ninth Symphony, and his monumental ‘Missa Solemnis’, sound forth an astonishing acceptance of suffering as a necessary condition of life.

If I try to listen to this profound feeling with a spiritual ‘ear’ (rather than from a technical or analytical perspective), I’m sure I pick up resonances of Beethoven’s suffering whenever my bow touches the strings stretched across my body.  If Paul Tillich, a 20^th century thinker, is right in suggesting that anyone ‘who knows about depth knows about God’, then surely Beethoven knew God particularly through his growing recognition of suffering as a necessary condition of the depth of life.  His Seventh Symphony came across that way, and all the later works show a profound developing spirituality which has changed the world of music for ever.

(Manuscript from ‘Missa Solemnis’ in Beethoven’s hand)

Lord & Lady Burghersch were surprised to notice Beethoven sitting in the congregation at an act of worship with the notorious Fr Zacharias Werner preaching. Werner’s sermons were very popular in Vienna at this Congress time, with their evangelical and social-holiness fervour, not unlike John Wesley and the early Methodists back in England.  Mind you, I’d like to know if Beethoven had managed to ‘lip-read’ by now?

(Fr Zacharias Werner)

Over the years, countless commentators have tried to analyse the nature of Beethoven’s spirituality and his belief/non-belief in God.  He clearly was not conventional, and he ‘sat very lightly’ to the doctrines and teaching of the Catholic Church, but whenever I play his music my whole being (body and bow) has the potential to resonate with my player’s body in sounding something truly alive.  Maybe God is there too?