Walking home after choir one night my friend and fellow chorister Barbara and I agreed the hardest piece we’ve ever done was Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis.
Here’s what I wrote about it at the time, (referring specifically to the Credo section):
No human can sing this. Aliens can sing this, robots can sing this, but it is beyond mere mortals and it is certainly beyond me. So far it’s taken five months of daily practice all to barely manage 45 seconds of music. Every note of that fugue is like racing toward a suicidal leap off a vocal cliff.
Singing it is physically painful. In minutes my throat hurts. It’s the exact opposite of singing Mozart, who wrote soprano sections like he was inside our throats sprinkling magic fairy dust. Singing Mozart is effortless. Every note is like a kiss, like we were his most cherished instruments. Mozart gets us. Beethoven hates us.
The soprano part in Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis is so brutal I actually spent time researching whether or not a soprano had pissed Beethoven off to the point where he’d want to punish the soprano section. And, as a matter of fact, I did uncover an unattractive side to Beethoven involving a woman.
The year Beethoven started working on the Missa Solemnis he had suffered a temporary setback in a long, drawn-out custody battle with his sister-in-law Johanna for his nephew Karl. It was a fight that got so ugly that Beethoven’s biographers continue to apologize for him to this day. Although Beethoven would ultimately gain custody as a result of his stunning cruelty, in 1819, Johanna was awarded guardianship of Karl.
So he’s working on the Missa Solemnis, he’s enraged about losing Karl to Johanna and perhaps feeling powerless—maybe either consciously or unconsciously he was getting back at Johanna through us. We’re her stand-in. In the piece, he makes the sopranos go up to a high b flat and then he has us stay there for I don’t remember how many measures. A lot. It’s tiring. He also makes us sing it forte (loud) which is even more tiring and, if you’re not careful, painful. He has us do this over and over throughout the piece. It’s like he’s standing there saying, “Take that! And that! And that!”
Beethoven would win Karl back, but the poor kid loved his mother. He visited her in secret, which for some reason did not inspire Beethoven’s pity. Instead, he was so oblivious and unsympathetic and miserable to live with that in 1826 Karl tried to kill himself. When Karl recovered he asked to be taken back to his mother. Beethoven died less than a year later, after receiving a case of wine from his publisher to celebrate the publication of the Missa Solemnis. “Pity—Pity—too late!” were his final words from his deathbed.
After writing that I had a few other ideas about why Beethoven kept the sopranos up in the stratosphere so long. The Missa Solemnis was one of the last pieces he wrote, and by this time he was almost completely deaf. Maybe the highest frequencies were the last of Beethoven’s hearing to go? Maybe he was simply striving to hear and hold onto the only notes that remained for him. Or, maybe he thought the higher we went, the closer to God. Finally, maybe this piece, which is so undeniably magnificent, was not about punishing Johanna, but about saying “I’m sorry.” This is pure fantasy on my part of course, but if there's the tiniest bit of truth there, it would make the Missa Solemnis the most beautiful apology the world has ever heard.
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Hi! I'm a new member here. My name is Stacy Horn and I have a new book about singing called Imperfect Harmony: Finding Happiness Singing With Others (Algonquin Books, July, 2013). I sing with the Choral Society of Grace Church (NYC) and this is a picture of the Grace Church magnolia tree that blooms briefly in the Spring.
