By Mark Freer
Mark Freer is a leading Church musician and concert pianist. He is
organist
and choirmaster for the Latin Mass at Holy Name Church in Adelaide, and
has
performed and broadcast in Australia, Switzerland, Germany and Italy.
At the 2005 international seminar in Lugano, Switzerland, commemorating
Hans
Urs von Balthasar's 100th anniversary, he presented a lecture and a
Mozart
concert accompanied by the leader of the Queensland Orchestra, Warwick
Adeney; his seminar paper appeared in the Spring 2005 'Communio'
journal
entitled "The Triune Conversation in Mozart: Towards a Theology of
Music".
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg on 27 January 1756, and
his
250th anniversary is being celebrated this year in concert halls and on
the
airwaves all over the Western world.
Everyone, it seems, loves Mozart. As a small boy I would march round
and
round the room to an old recording of the Haffner Symphony that my
father
used to play, and in my professional vocation as a musician that love
has
remained and grown.
I find myself in excellent company in this regard.
The Pope's brother Msgr Georg Ratzinger - for thirty years choirmaster
of
Regensburg Cathedral - recently gave an interview to a Swiss Catholic
press
agency, in which he divulged that Benedict XVI's favourite musical
pieces
are Mozart's Clarinet Quintet and the Clarinet Concerto.
Inside the Vatican reported that Benedict was playing Mozart on his
piano on
the Sunday afternoon following his installation as Pope, when he
returned to
his old apartment to see his brother. And papal biographer George
Weigel
said in Newsweek after Benedict's election that "here is another
surprise
for cartoonists of the dour Ratzinger: he's a Mozart man, which I take
to be
an infallible sign of someone who is, at heart, a joyful person."
Georg Ratzinger supplies further anecdotes:
"Does he still find time to 'tickle the ivories'?"
"Very seldom. But the last time I was in Rome with the Cathedral Choir
the
piano lid was open, and Mozart sonatas were lying there, open. He knows
himself that his playing is hardly of an elevated standard, but he
enjoys
it. And his desire to make music still finds its most beautiful outlet
in
Mozart."
"What sort of piano does he have then?"
"It's of no particular brand. We bought it when he was a lecturer in
Freising. The action is not so great, but it looks very nice, and the
tone
is fine. For the papal palace in Castelgandolfo the Steinway firm has
donated a small grand piano, one which I also used to enjoy playing
very
much. Then there's talk of getting one for the Vatican too, but my
brother
said it's not worth it. For one thing he doesn't have much time, and
also he
gauges his own abilities realistically. For his own playing, his old
piano
is good enough."
Msgr Ratzinger also gives a musical portrait of their family home. He
says,
"At home we played the harmonium. Our parents were of the view that it
would
prepare us for the organ. In one practice book was a piece of two lines
reputed to be by Mozart. I could never identify it later. The 'Mozart
year'
1941 brought an intensification. During the 150th year after the
composer's
death there was a Mozart broadcast every Sunday, at lunch time. As I
was the
one in the family who was the most musically engaged, I was allowed to
occupy my father's place at the table, which was directly next to the
radio.
Then in July I went with my brother to a Mozart concert put on by the
Regensburg Cathedral choir. There they sang excerpts from The
Impresario in
costume; it was quite wonderful. I couldn't sleep the whole night."
Human existence
But let's hear Benedict himself on the subject.
In the extended interview that was published ten years ago as Salt of
the
Earth, we read:
"You are a great lover of Mozart?".
"Yes! Although we moved around a very great deal in my childhood, the
family
basically always remained in the area between the Inn and the Salzach.
And
the largest and most important and best parts of my youth I spent in
Traunstein, which very much reflects the influence of Salzburg. You
might
say that there Mozart thoroughly penetrated our souls, and his music
still
touches me very deeply, because it is so luminous and yet at the same
time
so deep. His music is by no means just entertainment; it contains the
whole
tragedy of human existence."
"So luminous ... so deep ... contains the whole tragedy of human
existence",
says the man who is now Pope. Many, including myself, would agree.
The deeper one enters into Mozart's music, the more one anticipates
insights
in between those little quavers and crotchets; in short, the more one
allows
it to "penetrate the soul", the more it is felt as transcendent,
sublime,
consummately beautiful.
Hans Urs von Balthasar was a close friend of Cardinal Ratzinger.
Together
with Cardinal de Lubac and others they founded the Communio
International
Catholic Review, published today in fifteen countries. Balthasar dared
to
express himself in directly theological fashion, speaking of the
miraculous
Mozart who had the "power of the heart" to sense infallibly the true
and the
genuine.
Referring to The Magic Flute, he writes: "What must appear everywhere
else
as a vain image of fantasy or even of blasphemy - the definitive
revelation
of eternal beauty in a genuine earthly body - may well have become
blessed
reality just once, here, in the realm of the Catholic Incarnation."
And this astonishing passage from his Tribute to Mozart:
"Do we not come from God and return to him, passing through the waters
and
fires of time, suffering and death? And why should we not permit
ourselves
to be led through the dissonances of our existence by the Zauberfl�te,
a
tremendous adumbration of love, light and glory, eternal truth and
harmony?
Is there a better, indeed another manner to bear witness to the
nobility of
our divine filiation than to make present whence we came and where we
are
going?
"All those whom we take for our models tried to have it that way, and
above
all he who knew himself to be the Son of the Father, who had the face
of the
Father before his eyes always, and whose will he accomplished. Mozart
serves
by making audible the triumphal hymn of a prelapsarian [before Man's
Fall]
and resurrected creation, in which suffering and guilt are not
presented as
faint memory, as past, but as conquered, absolved, fixed present."
Freemasonry
All this will inevitably scandalise those who regard Mozart primarily
as a
Freemason, and The Magic Flute principally as a piece of Freemasonic
symbology, both true enough in themselves. Balthasar too - the
"theologian
of beauty" - is viewed in certain circles with suspicion. Yet, as
Cardinal
Ratzinger said at von Balthasar's funeral, "The Church itself, in its
official responsibility, tells us that he is right in what he teaches
of the
Faith".
The subject of Mozart's Freemasonry was raised with Georg Ratzinger. He
said, "It isn't for me to pass judgement on Mozart. He was a man with
many
difficulties arising from the period he lived in, and from the
circumstances
of his life. The issue of his Freemasonry disturbs me insofar as he was
not
only an ordinary member, but attained the rank of Master, and wanted to
found his own lodge. Freemasonry was obviously fashionable at that time
in
Vienna. Certainly he hoped for material gain from his membership.
Whether he
reflected on the theological implications I don't know."
No thoughtful Catholic will have difficulty distinguishing Mozart's
music
from his Freemasonry, any more, for example, than separating Bach's
work
from his Lutheranism. Moreover, if we were to dismiss every human work
that
had been created by a sinner as invalid, there would not be much left
standing. I was once taken to task for leading a congregation in a
"Protestant tune", to which I replied, "Which note was Protestant?" Let
us
move on.
All beauty comes from God. There is no beauty that does not come from
the
Father through Christ, Himself the embodiment of all beauty. St
Augustine,
in a famous passage from the Confessions, addresses God as Beauty
personified: "Late have I loved You, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new,
late
have I loved You!"
Contrary to popular opinion, true beauty (the only kind there is,
despite
Satan's posturings) is objective. Truth and goodness are beautiful just
as
the beautiful is true and good.
A wonderful passage from Balthasar's The Glory of the Lord says,
"Beauty is
the word that shall be our first. Beauty is the last thing which the
thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as an
uncontained
splendour around the double constellation of the true and the good and
their
inseparable relation to one another [my italics]. Beauty is the ... one
without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word
which
... has bid farewell to our new world, leaving it to its avarice and
sadness."
In former times the liturgy, too, "refused to understand itself" apart
from
beauty: beauty was taken for granted. The fact that the holy liturgy
has -
in broad terms - been a casualty of the modern exaltation of ugliness
is for
Benedict XVI a matter of grave concern.
Mass culture
He speaks scathingly of mass culture geared to quantity, production and
success: "Pop music joins up with this culture ... It is a reflection
of
what this society is, the musical embodiment of kitsch ... Hindemith
used
the term brainwashing for this kind of noise, which can hardly be
called
music any more ... Is it a pastoral success when we are capable of
following
the trend of mass culture and thus share the blame for its making
people
immature or irresponsible? (A New Song for the Lord, p.108).
For him, "faith becoming music is part of the process of the Word
becoming
flesh" (p. 122).
But there is no chance here of doing justice to the breadth and
profundity
of our theologian-Pope's writings.
Here is one small small taste: "It is not the case that you think
something
up then sing it; instead, the song comes to you from the angels, and
you
have to lift up your heart so that it may be in tune with the music
coming
to it. But above all this is important: the liturgy is not a thing the
monks
create. It is already there before them. It is entering into the
liturgy of
the heavens that has always been taking place. Earthly liturgy is
liturgy
because and only because it joins what is already in process, the
greater
reality (p.129).
And a last word from Msgr. Georg Ratzinger:
"Many describe your brother as the "Mozart of theology". What do you
think
of this title?"
"Joachim Cardinal Meisner of Cologne coined this phrase. It has a
certain
justification. My brother's theology is not as problematic and
difficult as
that of Karl Rahner ... Directness, clarity and form: his work does
seem to
have these elements in common with Mozart's music."
Reprinted from AD2000 Vol 19 No 3 (April 2006), p. 12