Theory about the Missa Solemnis

 Theory: one I'm not sure I believe. In his late works, Beethoven wrote a series of novels in sound in which he tells us exactly what it's like to be from his era and locale: one in the final four sonatas, one in the final five quartets, and an orchestral one begun with the ninth symphony that doubtless had a few more to go. Scraps of every musical style he'd ever heard is in these works from sublime church counterpoint to garish street music, and late Beethoven functions as a kind of diary for them: perhaps a better way of referring to it is an 'autobiography in sound.'

The one thoroughly complete novel in a single work is the Missa Solemnis. A work so thoroughly atraditional that when the traditional ending insists on itself, there's still an hour of the work to go. It took Beethoven four years to write a work of this scale, even had he ten more years he would have not attempted another.

The Missa Solemnis is a near-literary stream of consciousness about Beethoven's experiences of the sacred. If you try to analyze it in a traditional harmonic way, you won't understand the work. This is, my guess, why Furtwangler abandoned performing the work during his Berlin period. True to his pessimistic nature, Adorno calls it an 'alienated magnum opus.' I suppose I understand why Adorno would think it alienated: think of Bach's B-Minor Mass and how it smiles at the question of transcendence, while Beethoven brings to the transcendent questions an unmistakable question mark. But anything that strives however mightily for the infinite will only bring an impression of the infinite down to earth rather than the real thing, and in that sense Beethoven's grandest work is no different from Bach's. If the Missa Solemnis is an alienated work, then all the most transcendent art is similarly alienated.

In that sense, the composer the Missa prefigures most is Mahler, so it probably follows that IMO, the conductors who get closest to its spirit are conductors who excel in Mahler: Gielen, Bernstein, Kubelik, a few other familiar names too, who perceive that this musical world must be made to sound as though it contains literally everything.

The musical key to organizing the Missa Solemnis is counterpoint, but the formal key cannot be found in music. I believe the key to organizing the Missa Solemnis is literary and philosophical. Doubtless Beethoven was extremely familiar with Goethe's Faust, with which it shares a seeming formlessness in its structure and seeming randomness in its themes. But in both of them, the teeming abundance of invention creates a shape of its own, a shape that cannot be contained by traditional boundaries of form.

Take Beethoven sonatas 106-111 together, and you have a larger metawork in which the ultra-contrapuntal ending of the Hammerklavier is the mere conclusion to a first volume of four, and taken together, the four are far more meditative and probing than even their most profound moments sound when played piecemeal in performance. In the same way, the Gloria is merely a conclusion to the second volume of five in which Beethoven mounts his ultimate answer to the questions of transcendence, or, perhaps, his ultimate question about the answers of transcendence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcGS6zs6Rxs