Artists Who Inspire: Ludwig Van Beethoven | Rev. T. J. FitzGerald | 07.21.024
Sermon Transcript
Music, they say, is sacred. Now I know there’s a kind of music called sacred music, but I think putting the sacred like that in a box and giving it a name, a modifier like that means us humans are getting a little big for our britches. When I need some humility to remember I am human, music and the great masters of its making help me to do that. Music, its creation, the way it falls upon us however it does for you, through perfect ears or with no hearing at all is sacred. On an ordinary Sunday like this one, we experience in worship as much music as we do this talking. It makes sense people timing this talk and making sure we get an even distribution of music and words. How old do you think this format, this way of being together in worship on Sundays is? With these solo, beautiful, solo pieces, the choral music sometimes, prayers and speaking and messages, and my favorite part, the singalongs. Some of you call those hymns, I don’t know why.
The order is ancient, it dates back millennia. And I’m sorry to say the sermon is not about doing that entire history of what worship really is, we’ll save that for another Sunday. So it shouldn’t surprise you though that these feelings that connect humans to one another and to the enable, these may be unspeakable moments in our lives are often accessed. And brought to the surface by music and it’s not just in church or in a sanctuary of some kind. I remember once a friend of mine was getting ready to get married and in a sort of ill-conceived moment I agreed to perform that wedding in a diner. I mean, it was a nice diner. It wasn’t like, not that there isn’t any… Anyway, I’m in the diner hole now.
But before the wedding I do some work couples that are getting married and he was telling us a story, some of our friends, about a breakup he’d gone through. And as part of the story, not really meaning to maybe to just get a laugh, he mentioned the song he played on repeat after this terrible breakup as he cried and cried and cried. And we’ve all been through breakups, but this was the one that was set to the music of I Can’t Make You Love Me by Bonnie Raitt. Yeah exactly, that breakup. And we shared his pain, not just with the story of the breakup but with the song that evoked something in our own lives that accessed the deepest wells of our pain and relieved kind of our suffering in that shared moment of humanity. Music does that. It lights up these parts of our souls, of our beings that connect to one another in ways that nothing else does, nothing else can. Its gifts are beyond measure, that’s why I say music is sacred.
So if music is sacred, does that mean that everything that musicians do is also sacred? I mean, of course I’m not counting Dolly Parton, naturally everything she does is sacred but next summer. Growing up as I did at the time when bands like Guns and Roses and Mötley Crüe were touring the country in a fit of amateur hotel room renovations while they were on tour, shall we say. These metal bands though aren’t the only ones, the only horrifying examples of the abject humanity, shall we say, of musical artists who produce music that still shatters your soul even at those young ages. I was talking to a friend in a coffee shop about this sermon and I said, “I think we could do a whole series just on musicians who changed the world and didn’t live to see their 30th birthday”. That is the power of music and the young. The state of managing deep and painful troubles while also producing music that changed the world, this duality might best be held and illustrated by a artist today, Ludwig van Beethoven.
Ludwig’s dad was an eminently forgettable singer in the German court. All reports are that his genius for drinking were rivaled only by his genius for exploiting and promoting his talented son Ludwig. At the time, Mozart was all the rage when Beethoven was coming up. And Beethoven’s dad wanted him to be as big or bigger a star as Mozart and to do this, he billed Ludwig as this 6-year-old prodigy, just like Mozart had been billed to become famous. The problem was that Ludwig was actually seven or eight, got to get a gimmick I guess. Ludwig found no fame or notoriety, not a clip of a review exists from that time at any of those concerts, but what he did acquire from that time was a lifelong insistence that he was born in 1772 when in fact he was born in 1770. And it did not get a lot better for good old Ludwig Van after that.
Historians seem, unfortunately, to be united in the belief that Beethoven was not much of a looker turns out. Biography.com, apparently the mean kid clearly of biographical publications, they shall be barred from my memorial for this, but they speculate that his appearance combined with his terrible shyness is what led to his bachelorhood and his failure to produce any children. Now, the temper he was known to have did not help. Once he tried to break a chair over a patron’s head, a prince. And once he stood in his doorway calling out to all on the street over and over that his friend was a donkey while his friend was trapped inside trying to get out, kind of behind him. And luckily some of his finest temper tantrums were committed to the written word. Yes. What would it have been like to be his assistant to receive a letter from my supervisor to open it up only to be compared to a sewer that is overflowing. And I’m editing that.
Yes, if music is sacred, its Oracles can sometimes leave a little to be desired. Except for Dolly Parton, that’s right. It’s a whole nother thing. And people call Beethoven a genius, like all the artists we’re looking at this summer. Genius is one of those words that’s meant to sound like a compliment, right, but it isn’t. I can hear all you geniuses there going, that’s right. It might just as well be the word monster. It might just as well be a way to set a person apart from others, to differentiate them from the rest us. It is easier, maybe more comfortable, to say that someone who did what Beethoven did in spite of all life dealt him is different than us, is separate, inhuman in some ways. But are they, I mean, was he?
In his day he was also separate from others. It was part of his celebrity, yes. It was part of his temper, yes. But there was much more going on in his life. In a letter he wrote to two of his brothers around the age of 30 or 32, depending who you ask, Beethoven said this about what people think of him and what he was trying to do in the world, his words. He’s a little dramatic. “Oh, you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you and I would have ended my life. It was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me”. It was beautiful. He never sent that letter to his brothers. An assistant found it among his papers after his death. He wasn’t making art for art’s sake, Beethoven. He wasn’t a monster so different than any one of us. He knew he was not popular, perhaps not pleasant according to biography.com.
But he thought of ending his life at 30 because the music, the sacred in his life though stayed his hand. One writer said that Beethoven did not have a musical life, his only life was music. Because when something saves your life, when you find something worth living for, even when you don’t want to live anymore in a world that does not seem to want you. Like it or not in some way, that is when you find your real life. That is the mark of conversion on this path of our journey of life. It’s where your real life begins. And for Beethoven, that was music that saved and changed his life. The pain he was confessing in the letter though was from his losing his hearing. Around the turn of the 19th century, Beethoven could no longer make out what people were saying in regular conversation. He withdrew into himself. His world, his life in some ways was shrinking smaller and smaller and left him miserable and in deep despair, but he found a way to put beauty in the world and that is a sacred act.
When we hold up the lives of so many of these artists in this series, it’s not so different than the ways we as your ministers hold your lives. When I hear the stories of these artists, I think of you sometimes and left wondering what I often am, which is can’t we just have the beauty? Can’t we just have the sacred? Why all the suffering? Maybe we could just make a deal, we could split the difference a little bit. And maybe life could be just a little less glorious, a little less beautiful, a little less stunning and awe-inspiring, and then we can have just a little less suffering. Can we bring the ends a little in?
This is just what I think of in my mind. But it doesn’t work out that way. We know the deep wells of suffering are drawn up in our lives again and again despite our trying to stop them. And so it was with Ludwig trying to please an alcoholic exploitive parent, losing his hearing, biography.com’s opinion of his looks. And to top it all off, like that wasn’t enough, what else did he have? Unrequited love. I can’t make you love me. Poor Ludwig. The prevailing theory is that his deep and unspoken love was for Antoine Brittano, a woman married to someone else. I confessed when I read the name Antoine, I was like, we’re going to have one hell of a sermon today. Reverend T. J. breaks the mystery open. I don’t know why I did that. Anyway.
But a broken heart pining for a love that cannot be returned. It is a wound the world knows well, not just in popular music, but in the corners of so many of our own experiences. To love and to have lost. The quarter-century after Beethoven wrote to his brothers in his existential pain, 25 years past that. And after a decades and decades of a love he could not have, it was on May 7th, 1824 that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the choral symphony premiered. Caroline Unger, one of the soloists at that premiere, was living and had a chance to share her recollection with a British journalist a few decades after that performance, but she seemed to remember it quite clearly.
“The master, though placed in the midst of this confluence of music, heard nothing of it at all and was not even sensible of the applause of the audience at the end of his great work but continued standing with his back to the audience and beating the time. [inaudible 00:15:36] who had sung the contra alto part, turned him or induced him to turn around and face the people who were still clapping their hands and giving way to the greatest demonstrations of pleasure. His turning round and the sudden conviction thereby forced upon everybody that he had not done so before because he could not hear what was going on, acted like an electric shock on all present. And a volcanic explosion of sympathy and admiration followed, which was repeated again and again and seemed as if it would never end”.
Who’s seen the fourth movement of the symphony live? All y’all need to get some church. You got to see this. The fourth movement of the symphony includes this vocal setting of the Ode to Joy by Friedrich Schiller. No one had ever until that moment had a movement of classical music with singing in it at all. Imagine that a form of music… I should say in a symphony until then. A form of music in place for a century or more, and those people heard that form crack open before their eyes and pour out something brand new into that place, into that sanctuary. Schiller’s poem actually was written in 1790 and soared with hope for the future of humankind, and then the poet so dismayed with war and with bloody revolutions and what he saw of humans doing to other humans revised the poem to something a little less hopeful. So Beethoven took the first version and the second version and combined them into these words. “Joy, beautiful spark of the god’s, daughter of Elysium, we enter, drunk with fire, heavenly ones your sanctuary. Your spells bind again what strictly divided, all people become brothers, where your gentle wing rests. Be embraced millions, this kiss for the whole world, be embraced, be embraced, this kiss for the whole world”.
Aw Ludwig, you softy. Imagine coming to see a symphony and on the stage for the entire four movements is the chorus and the soloists who sit there for almost an hour doing nothing. Then halfway through the fourth movement, the final movement, they finally rise and find their voices and they sing a song like that. It was a sensation, a volcanic explosion, which is why this piece, like anything so powerful with such a history and such force is used so widely, if not overused. And I’m not just talking about die hard, there’s lots of other ways. In a recent article on the pieces 200th anniversary this year, the New York Times, the writer called it “Too accessible for its own good”. And that’s because history, if you really look at it with this piece, tyrants and dictators use it as their birthday present as quickly as peacemakers and those who are searching for unity have tried to also bend this piece to their will. The writer calls it though supra national, transcending nationality, transcending movement or religion or philosophy. It premiered according to the musicologist, Harvey Sachs, in the middle of a decade characterized by dynastic repression and ultra conservative nationalism. We don’t know anything about that, right?
It’s not just on the rise, it’s here. And in that rising tide two centuries ago, Beethoven’s ode was to joy. A joy that calls to the world, not only a pocket of it to the world, not only a manmade bordered economic arrangement called a country, but to all the world embracing one another. And he set it to music that a human can hum. Beethoven not known for hummable tunes, can I get a Amen. Yeah. Okay. He composed a tune that we could hum. Hum is a substantial part of being human, if you catch my drift. And he knew exactly what he was doing because he composed a tune that you could take with you. He wanted one that you can take into the world to remind you of what is possible. He dared the listeners to find joy in this place over and over in themselves. I’ll tell you, when I have had moments of joy lately, I mean I was on vacation so. Not that I got joy when I was anywhere other than here, this is the only place for joy. But when I was having them, I noticed what followed right after a lot of times was sadness.
Like I was maybe mad at myself for feeling joy with all that is going on in the world. No, I feel you. I feel in those moments more sharply. I think it clarifies the horrors that so many people around the world are facing in their own lives, that are rife in our human family right now, down the street, around the world, and of late this foreboding of this ultra conservative nationalism and what it might mean to me and the people I love, that strikes at my joy too. But fear will always want to take joy as a toll because we are guided in this time by the vision of one of the world’s greatest composers to see and feel this truth. As powerful as suffering, and criticism, and fear may seem joy is an act of resistance and it is sacred. A conservative rabbi, a gay conservative rabbi in New York City is retiring this week. One of the famous things she said is that joy is also an act of political resistance.
As powerful and suffering as it is, joy is there and it is sacred. And when we stop listening to all that is being said around us, like Beethoven was forced to do, and find ways to embrace one another in the suffering we share, in the loves we may be longing for, or even losing in the despair that claws at the windows of the soul, it is there in faiths like this one that see all as part of this human family and rebind us, which is what religion means, rebinds us to one another in this sanctuary, not just here, not just of our hearts, but in the sanctuary of the world that our love, our hope, and our joy may live. This is the sacred message inspired in us today by one whose life was marked with pain, with near ruin, and yet was saved for us by his art. To point a way for people and embracing faith in one another that has seen us through the hardest times and found joy. That has seen us through tides of hate and division and found joy. That will see us home at the end of each of our journeys to find joy.
Like an electric shock on all present. A volcanic explosion of sympathy and admiration which repeats again and again as if it would never end, humming all the way. May it ever be so, bless it be, and amen.
