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MASSES COMPOSED BY SKEPTICS
The hymn is not so important in a Catholic as in a Protestant church. It had no place in the ritual as it was finally evolved in the Middle Ages; in accordance, of course, with the blue-prints entrusted to Peter by Jesus in ancient Galilee, The faithful were to assist AT, not assist IN or take part in the ceremonies, as I will consider in the next chapter. We are told in Pliny's letter to the Emperor Trajan that the early Christians met to "sing hymns to Christ as God." -- probably chanting psalms in the Jewish tradition -- but the "mass" was at that time not developed. When it was, the faithful were in much the same position as skeptics in a theater, watching a performance in strange costumes at the far end of the building.
Into all that, however, we cannot enter here but must confine ourselves to the actual use of the art of music in Catholic services today; and the chief question that interests us about it is whether in the case of this art at least the Catholic creed has not simply employed but inspired the artist.
Music would lend itself to such inspiration more easily than any other art. No painter or sculptor has ever given us a Jesus or Mary that we could plausibly imagine in a Judaic environment, and Michael Angelo's "Last Judgment" and Ruben's "Descent of the Cross" are human scenes into which the spectator must read the Catholic idea. Literary art is more complete to express idea's or dogmas, but the expression can be immensely enhanced if it is associated with noble music. If Catholicism inspires art, therefore, we should look for a body of it in music corresponding in magnificence to the great architecture, sculpture, and painting of the Middle Ages; especially as, notoriously the chief attraction of the non- Catholics whom it is hoped to convert to the wealthier churches is "the fine music." Instead of having to listen, as one does in most non-Catholic churches, to communal singing which, while it is more enjoyed by the congregation itself, is rather artless than artistic to the outsider, though it may be relieved at one point by a professional soloist whom you may have heard in a cabaret the night before, you can hear, well rendered if the church is not poor, often with orchestral accompaniment, some of the finer compositions of masters of music.
Here you get the most decisive -- and the most deadly -- test of the claim that the Roman religion inspires art. Not relying on my memory of church-experience 50 years ago I take from a recent authoritative publication the names of ten of the greatest composers of masses, litanies, and shorter pieces that are used in Catholic churches today: Beethoven, Berlioz, Cherubini, Dvorak, Gounod, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Verdi, and Weber. All these are included in the Catholic Encyclopedia and it is claimed, especially or by implication that they were Catholics.
Yet no less than six of the ten were apostates -- Beethoven, Berlioz, Cherubini, Haydn, Mozart, and Verdi -- in some cases notoriously apostates, and some of the others were not clearly orthodox. Gounod alone can be quoted as a man of real Catholic piety -- in spots. You will read in biographies of him how at one time he got so religious that he began to study for the Church: how one day, when he asked Sarah Bernhardt if 'She ever prayed and she said, "Me pray! Never, I'm an atheist," he fell upon his knees before her and, to her disgust prayed for her for quarter of an hour: and so on. Yes, and in the same biographies you will read about his various little mistresses and his superficial changes of mood. In all his work, says one authority, he "hovered between mysticism and theatricality." Another authority says "between mysticism and voluptuousness's," In his sacred work, says the Catholic Encyclopedia sadly, he "did not penetrate the spirit of the liturgy": which is a flat denial of Catholic inspiration. It was such music, fine as it is, as Counod's Messe solennelle and Ave Maria that moved the distinguished scientist Claude Bernard (also claimed as a Catholic, of course, though a well-known apostate) to say that Catholic services are just "opera for servant girls."
The most flagrant cases of Catholic misrepresentation are those of Beethoven, Cherubini, and Mozart. Beethoven's Mass in D is coupled by authorities with his famous Ninth Symphony as "the most gigantic of all musical designs." It is not, like Brahms's' Mass, a Protestant composition but was intended, when he began to compose it, to be performed at the installation of the Catholic Archbishop of Olmutz and is today one of the richest treasures of the Catholic repertory. But almost any biography will tell you that at that time Beethoven had already abandoned his Catholic faith and adopted Goethe's Pantheism, in comparison with which he thought the Christian creed tawdry. His friend and chief biographer, A. Schindler, and Nohl in his preface to Beethoven's Brevier (1870) state this, and Sir G. Maeferren, who describes the Mass as "perhaps the grandest piece of musical expression which art possesses," says (Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography) that he was "a free thinker." He was persuaded, as some other distinguished freethinkers were to accept the sacraments before death, but all admit that he looked upon them as, at the best, symbols. Nohl says that when the ceremony was over Beethoven murmured, in the old Latin theatrical phrase, "Applaud, friends, the comedy is over," but the better-informed Schindler says that in these words Beethoven referred to the approaching close of his life. It is at all events agreed that he had very seriously, on philosophic grounds, discarded Catholicism 30 years before he wrote the Mass and, unlike other artists, he never wavered in his Rationalism.
Cherubini, though his name is not as familiar to our generation as those of Beethoven and Wagner, composed five masses, two Requiems (or mass for the dead), and a very large number of pieces for Catholic use. A critic pronounces these "the most important works of their age," and Gounod who agrees, quotes Beethoven saying chiefly with an eye to his religious work, that Cherubini was "the greatest master of his age." But it is undisputed that he abandoned the Catholic religion before he composed any of this sacred music. He lived in Paris in the revolutionary days and devoted his great talent to the revolutionary cause. It was after the Restoration, when he was superintendent of the royal chapel, that he wrote masses, etc., but he never returned to the faith. His British Catholic biographer Bellasis admits that he did not receive the sacraments before death and quotes the reluctant testimony of his Catholic daughter that he was "not mystical but broad-minded in religion." Another biographer observes that his sacred music was "not created by faith in and love of what he composed."
Mozart, who composed 15 masses and a very large amount of other Catholic pieces, had so decidedly rejected the Catholic creed in early manhood that when he was dying he refused his wife's entreaty that he would see a priest, and his apostasy was so notorious that when the wife herself asked a priest to come the man refused, and the great musician wag buried without ceremony in the common grave of the poor. So his chief biographers Wilder and Ulibichev, and the facts are undisputed. The latter quotes Mozart saying in reference to his early Catholic belief: "That is all over and will never come back" (I. 243). He had become a Freemason before he was thirty, at a time when the Church regarded Freemasonry as a device of the devil, and to the end of his life he remained at the most a Deist. As is well known, he composed one of the most beautiful and most frequently used masses of the dead, and the circumstances throw an ironic light on this question of art and Catholicism. A rich musical amateur, Count Walsegg, secretly paid Mozart, who was desperately poor, to compose the mass and let Walsegg put his name on it. Shortly afterwards the great artist died and was "buried like a dog."
Let me further illustrate this point from the biography of another great musician. I do not suppose that the German Requiem of Brahms is used in Catholic services, as the music is set to texts from the German translation of the bible, which Catholics are forbidden to read, but it is just as "inspired" as Mozart's mass. Yet Brahms was an Agnostic, as he repeatedly tells in his letters (Letters of J. Brahms, Eng. trans. 1909). The instructive point is that it is obviously the thought of death that inspired the music, not the Catholic doctrine about death. In almost his last year of life Brahms wrote and composed his "Four Serious Songs (Ver Emate Gesange). The writer on him in the Encyclopedia Britannica calls these his "supreme achievement in dignified utterance of noble thought." It warns you to read some of these musical critics with discretion. The words of the songs plainly reject the idea of immortality, and Brahms admitted in a letter to Herzogenberg that that was his intention.
Haydn composed even more masses and other church music than Gounod or Cherubini, and he is still a high favorite in the Catholic repertory. In the Catholic Encyclopedia he is, of course, a loyal, if very amorous, son of the Church, though Mendelssohn's opinion that his sacred music was "scandalously gay" is quoted, and we get the usual caution that it is better as art than as an expression of Catholic ideas. In point of fact he was, like Mozart, a Freemason, and a Mason was to Rome in those days what a Bolshevik is today.
Verdi, has given the Church a mass for the dead, a Te Deum, an Ave Maria, a Stabat Mater and other sacred compositions, and he is feebly claimed in the Catholic Encyclopedia. It is a particularly brazen claim as, while such claims are usually in the case of great artists or scientists based upon the fact that the last sacraments were daubed on them while they were unconscious or administered to gratify Catholic relatives, Verdi stipulated in his will that he was to be buried without "any part of the formulae" (F.T. Garibaldi, Giuseppe Verde., 1903, p. 235). He was a man of more solid character than is usual in the operatic world -- he gave 2,000,000 lire to build a home for aged and ailing musicians. -- and wrote his mass for the dead only to honor his dead friend Manzoni. He was a moderate anti-Papal in the political struggle and was often assailed by the clergy.
A full inquiry, which naturally cannot be made for the purpose of writing one chapter of a booklet, into the lives and sentiments of all the leading composers of Catholic music would clearly be of considerable interest. I happened to have made some inquiry at an earlier date as far as these masters are concerned, and the results are quite enough for my purpose. The Church employed them and did not clearly inspire a single one of them. Like the painters of the Renaissance, whose art was equally great in depicting courtesans and saints, pious scenes and bacchanalian scenes, they were "neither Christians nor pagans but artists" as Symonds says. If you commission an artist, or if he himself proposes, to express the super-human, his own belief in the matter is not concerned.
Anyone who has heard one of these florid masses in a Catholic church feels that it is mainly, as in the opera-house, a commercial use of art. I was attached, as a priest and professor, to a middle- class suburban chapel in London for some years. As I have explained, the only obligation of the people was to bear a mass every Sunday morning, and the great majority discharged this, in spite of the general disposition to be longer abed on Sundays, by assisting at a short early mass. There was no music, and the "sublime" service was gabbled through by the priest in 25 minutes. At 11 there was a sung or "high" mass, and this -- it might have been called the Dress Parade -- all the more comfortable parishioners attended. Several times a year an orchestra was employed and one of the classical masses was sung. It doubtless gave many a heightened idea of the solemnity of the feast, but from the clerical angle it had only one aim: money. Very special collections, sometimes taken by the monks themselves, were made, and the extra hiring of singers and musicians was far more than covered.
The singers of these masses and other choral services are, even on ordinary Sundays quite commonly non-Catholics. They are just professional singers, and the question of combining a moderate wage with efficient work is regarded as more important than the question of their religion or irreligion. I never heard of one being "converted." Near the church to which I was attached was a popular beer-house of a superior type, and the pietists of our congregation sent in scandalized protests that after the Sunday services they had to see the whole body of singers repair noisily to the Saloon Bar. They never understood a word that they sang; for, as I said, the English hymn has a very small place on a Catholic Sunday evening service and none in the morning service. The whole performance is, in fact, sheerly theatrical. Even the priests at the altar -- there are usually three -- have a bench in the sanctuary and at intervals in their very sacred manipulations they retire to sit on this while the choir sings, with senseless repetitions (to give the composer elbow-room) and long-drawn phrases, certain parts of the mass. It is fine music; and it makes a mockery of the sense of the ritual from a religious viewpoint. Catholic's sometimes feel this.
My father used to tell of an experience of this kind. He once took a country cousin, a Catholic, to one of our swell morning services. When the choir finished the piece they were singing (in the ritual it was a simple recital of the creed) for the second or third time and went back to the middle once more, the man, who was moving restlessly in his sent, whispered to my father: "Damn it, Bill, why don't they say Amen and 'a done with it." |
