Finding Peace in Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis"

Sometimes, the emotional moments in music just jump up and grab you.

Our choral director says that as performers we often have to suppress our emotions while performing so that we can concentrate on the singing. The audience should have the emotional experience while we do the work of creating the music. Ludwig Van Beethoven's Missa Solemnis that we performed this weekend requires a lot of concentration from the orchestra, chorus, and especially conductor for the entire concert. I am a member of the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra Chorus, and we sang this wonderful opus three times this weekend on the NMSO's Classics Concert series. While the whole experience of singing with a wonderful orchestra is spiritually uplifting, there are times when the emotions in a performance can be overwhelming.

Night Lights

For me, this happened in our second performance on Saturday night during the last movement, Agnus Dei. While we were singing "dona nobis pacem," "grant us peace," I started getting choked up enough that I had a hard time singing for a few moments.

Finding Peace in Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis"

Beethoven lived in a time where there never was any peace. He supposedly was hiding in a basement when Napoleon attacked Vienna. Beethoven also lived with many painful physical maladies in addition to losing his hearing. If anyone had the right to be angry and depressed it was Beethoven. But he wrote believing in peace. In the score he even wrote that we should sing to pray for "inward and outer peace." As we sing, we just about believe that the outward peace will actually come, then Beethoven abruptly changes to martial music to remind us that war is still here. Our pleas for pacem become quiet and personal, probably to ask for the inward peace in spite of the outward war. After one last hopeful "dona pacem," the music just stops about six bars later, without the usual Beethoven big, exciting ending. It may mean that Beethoven knew that the prayers for peace will never end.

Nearly 200 years later, we are still praying for the same peace that Beethoven sought.

While we are supposed to making sure we sing the right notes at the right time, it is sometimes easy to be swept up in the emotion of the moment. For me, it's not just the pleas for peace, but gratitude for the opportunity to sing in the presence of such wonderful music. As musicians, we hope that we can temporarily bring some peace and light into the world to honor the brilliance of the man who could write such music when peace was so hard for him to find.

Finding Peace in Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis"