Winter Feast

Dorothy Parker wrote, “Life is a banquet, and some of you poor suckers are starving to death.” If you’re starved for food, for stimulation, these long gray winter days, might I offer you something wonderful? Get out of your comfort zone and listen to Ludwig Van Beethoven’s Mass in D major, Op. 123 “Missa solemnis,” or the Solemn Mass.

It is one of the only sacred, or church musical scores, Beethoven ever wrote. Late in his life, an old man, almost completely deaf, single, lonely, facing death, the master began to write the musical masterpiece. It took him over five years to complete it. In it this struggling musician, not known for his faith in God, struggled with the inexorable approach of the grave. And the old composer was at once angry, defiant, sad, hopeful, and finally, relinquishing, and filled with acceptance.  The music is a tapestry he has woven out of his angst. It is a fabric with silken threads, burlap, and barbed wire. A cloth knit from pain.

The mass opens with an austere music punctuated by three plaintive kyrie eleisions, or “Lord have mercies.” The tenor, the soprano, and the mezzo soprano each in turn.

There are musicologists who call this mass the most difficult of all choral music. It must have been a shocking piece when first performed in Russia.  Music of the mass celebrated for the dead were serene,  comforting, full of faith. Beethoven’s is about anger, defiance, and the struggle to find faith in God.

Herr Beethoven wrote on the original score, “From the heart. May it return to the heart.”

It is nothing less than his standing upright against the bludgeons of life, its joys and sorrows, and coming to terms with God, death, and hope for beyond.

Note it ends with amens, “so be its.”

Indeed, it is the road all travelers tread.

Listen to it. Focus. Ponder. Feel the music. Hate it. Love it. And become the richer because of it.

The Reverend Stephen Crotts is pastor of Village Presbyterian Church in Charlotte Court House, VA. He is also the director of the Carolina Study Center, Inc., a campus ministry, located in Chapel Hill, NC. Pastor Crotts may be reached at carolinastudycenter@msn.com.