The Catholic Beethoven

Abstract

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, most accounts of Beethoven’s religious attitudes have assumed that, as a child of the Enlightenment, the composer was estranged from the Catholicism into which he was born, adhering instead to an idiosyncratic and unorthodox religious outlook that was suspicious of dogma and tradition. This long-standing narrative has often resulted in the critical marginalization of Beethoven’s religious music, with the notable exception of the Missa solemnis, which is usually included among his most important compositions only by being understood as a humanist or universalist work transcending its superficial identity as a setting of the Catholic Mass. The Catholic Beethoven challenges the conventional wisdom concerning Beethoven’s religious views by demonstrating that both the composer and his religious pieces were influenced by the German Catholicism of his era to a greater extent than has been thought. It uses new historical perspectives on the role of religion in the Enlightenment to reinterpret existing biographical evidence, as well as the composer’s sacred works—not just the Missa solemnis, but also the Mass in C, Christus am Ölberge, and the Gellert Lieder. Beethoven’s outlook was primarily shaped by ideas associated with the German Catholic Enlightenment, a movement that sought to reconcile traditional Catholic beliefs with certain elements of the Enlightenment in its more familiar secular strands. At the same time, he also had some sympathy for what would have been construed at the time as more “conservative” approaches to Catholicism that were in tension with this Catholic Enlightenment.