Benedict and Mozart on True Happiness

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Friday, September 23, 2011

Benedict and Mozart on True Happiness

Benedict and Mozart on True Happiness | Monsignor Daniel B. Gallagher | September 23, 2011 | Ignatius Insight

Delivered on the eve of a highly touted visit to the United Kingdom last year, most of the world failed to notice a short speech Pope Benedict XVI gave following a performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Requiem at Castel Gandolfo. The Pontiff hailed the piece as an "elevated expression of genuine Christian faith" in which "everything is in perfect harmony; every note, every musical phrase is just so and cannot be otherwise." He reminisced about being overcome with "Mozart's che Heiterkeit" ("Mozartian serenity") every time he heard a Mozart Mass performed at his childhood parish. He marveled at Mozart's ability to fill even the most somber passages with a hope and joy that can only come from God's grace and a lively faith. Music, the pope claimed, was Mozart's way of making transparent the "illuminated response to divine Love, even when human life is torn apart by suffering and death."

The Holy Father has never kept his fondness for Mozart a secret. During a 1996 interview with Peter Seewald, the then-Cardinal Ratzinger explained that it was Mozart's unparalleled combination of luminosity and depth that first touched him as a boy in Traunstein. The glorious sound, combined with the sight and smell of incense gently rising to heaven, made manifest "the jubilation of the angels over the beauty of God."

A comment like this reveals not only the Holy Father's childlike faith, but his highly refined aesthetic sense that convinces him of the life to come. He considers music an authentic expression of reason, but a reason open to the depth of human emotion and the height of divine transcendence. He has recalled on numerous occasions hearing Leonard Bernstein conduct a program of Bach cantatas in Munich, after which both he and his neighbor (a Lutheran bishop) were immediately struck by the same certitude that the faith is true. "The music had such an extraordinary force of reality that we realized, no longer by deduction, but by the impact on our hearts, that it could not have originated from nothingness, but could only have come to be through the power of Truth that became real in the composer's inspiration."

In fact, music is one of the most direct ways of accessing Benedict XVI"s thought on reason, both human and divine, as well as the relation between the two. Our openness to the beauty and order of the world allows us to "discover that what is 'reasonable' extends far beyond what mathematics can calculate, logic can deduce and scientific experimentation can demonstrate." If we fail to catch sight of the breadth of human reason or logos, we fall short of appreciating the breadth of divine reason or Logos – a Logos which, in both cases, is "creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason." Music is a privileged forum in which the human and divine logos come to meet.