DAVID GOLDMAN: MARVELOUS ARTICLE ABOUT JEWS AND THE RELIGIOUS CHRISTIAN MUSIC
How should Jews feel about the religious music of great Christian composers (including the convert Felix Mendelssohn)? Norman Podhoretz [1] has said that he “senses the Infinite” listening to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. A devout Orthodox rabbi of my acquaintance allows that he loves Mozart’s Requiemmore than any other musical work. What does this music mean to Christians?Among all the arts, Western classical music is the only true innovation of the modern West: We can read Aeschylus or Pindar just as we do Shakespeare or Keats, but the ancient world produced nothing that resembles Josquin des Prez, let alone Mozart. Alone among the arts, classical music is an artifact of the modern Christian West, and it is hard to extract it from its Christian context.
On a Good Friday some 30 years ago, in an undistinguished church in a mid-sized German city, I heard the most remarkable musical performance of my life: Bach’s St. Matthew Passion with a combined amateur-professional orchestra, the church’s amateur choir, and hired vocal soloists. The Passion sets parts of the Gospel interspersed with devotional poems. It is ill-suited for the concert stage, for when performed as intended in church, on the saddest day of the Christian calendar, congregation and performers join the liturgical drama. (Strictly speaking, as an observant Jew, I shouldn’t have been in a church at all, although some Orthodox rabbis [2] permit Jews to enter evangelical churches that contain no religious iconography, such as the one where this recital was taking place.)
Music helps the Christian to mourn the death of Jesus of Nazareth, and Bach’s great work makes this intensely personal: A palpable hush came over players and congregation when the bass soloist sang his last aria, “Make yourself pure, my heart—I want to bury Jesus myself.” As Franz Rosenzweig wrote in The Star of Redemption of Christian music, “He who joins in singing a chorale, or who listens to the mass, the Christmas oratorio, the passion … wants to make his soul stand with both feet in time, in the most real time of all, in the time of the one day of the world of which all individual days of the world are but a part. Music is supposed to escort him there.” But during the nine days before the saddest event in the Jewish calendar, the 9th of Av, rabbinic law forbids Jews from hearing any music at all; the most lugubrious hazzan in the world is of no help.
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This past July, I dined in a kosher restaurant in Vienna with a young priest from an Austrian Stift who is finishing his studies in philosophy in Rome. As we finished the wine, Father A. challenged me: “What is your definition of beauty? My opinion of you will depend a great deal on your answer.” That is an important issue for Catholics, who believe that an earthly institution, namely the Church, holds the keys that unlock what is locked in heaven. If that is possible, God must make himself knowable in some way to humans, for example, by taking human form. One of these ways is beauty. Adapting Plato, Catholic theology equates the good and the beautiful by making them attributes of God.
“Beauty has two components,” I offered. “One is what we might call harmony: It unites all the elements of the object of perception into a whole in which the parts have a necessary relation to the whole.” That was right out of Plato, and Father A. flashed an arachnoid smile as I feinted toward the web.
“The other element is surprise,” I continued.
“What do you mean?” asked Father A., himself surprised.
“There are any number of things that meet the criterion of harmony—for example, geometrical constructions, crystal patterns, and so forth—but we don’ t necessarily consider them beautiful,” I went on. “They may be as dull as they are harmonious. The experience of beauty requires the sense of discovery of a harmony we hitherto did not perceive and whose existence we did not suspect.”
“That’s interesting,” Father A. allowed. “I hadn’t thought about it quite that way.”
“Would you agree,” I added, “that the concept of surprise is bound inextricably to the concept of expectation? I can only be surprised if something happens that differs from what I anticipated.”
“I suppose that is true,” said Father A.
“Let’s take the example of Mozart. Close to the end of the Andante [3] of the 21st piano concerto, Mozart brings back the opening F-major theme not in its original key, but rather in the remote key of A-flat major. Would that qualify as a beautiful surprise?”
“By all means,” said Father A. He admires Mozart.
“And the surprise depends on our expectations about musical form, in this case, the practice of recapitulating a theme in its original key?”
“I suppose so.”
“And someone who had never heard Western classical music might have no experience of musical form, and no such expectation?”
No answer this time. Father A. guessed where I was going with this.
“And someone who was so used to post-Romantic chromaticism, where tonality changes all the time, might not find it surprising to hear a recapitulation in a remote key?”
“Perhaps not,” he said.
“If the perception of beauty requires surprise, and surprise depends on expectation, have we not reached the conclusion that beauty is not absolute, but depends in some way on the expectations of the beholder?”
“I will have to give that some thought.”
“Let us consider another side of the problem,” I continued. “Is the beautiful good, and vice versa?”
“That is what I believe.”
“Can beauty be placed in the service of falsehood and immorality?”
“Not the truly beautiful,” he said.
“What about Mozart’s opera Così Fan Tutte, in which music as beautiful as any Mozart ever wrote promotes outright lies.” The opera involves two young men who set out to test the faithfulness of their fiancées, by seducing the other’s intended. There is not a single sympathetic character in the work, whose music is on par with the Marriage of Figaro or Don Giovanni. That may explain why it is less popular: The men are cynical and the women slutty.
“If art employs beauty to promote falsehood, then I cannot consider it truly beautiful,” Father A. decided. “If you exclude Così, your idea of beauty won’t convince a single classical musician,” I said, and we moved on to dessert. The Greek idea of beauty, naturalized into Catholic theology by St. Thomas Aquinas, is entirely alien to Mozart’s quirky humor. One might even speak of Mozart’s Jewish sense of humor, for his librettist in Così Fan Tutte was the converted Jew Lorenzo Da Ponte [4], and his ironic view of Christian society belongs to a peculiar mode of Jewish irony.
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Judaism does not accept the Greek concept of beauty carried over into Christianity. But how does Judaism—Torah and the rabbinic tradition—understand beauty? Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, director of the Strauss Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University, observes [5] that not once does the Tanakh call God “beautiful” (yafeh). God is called adir (splendid), and his voice is called hadar (majestic). As Rav Aharon Lichtenstein wrote [6]:
The verse says (Tehillim 29:4), “Kol Hashem ba-ko’ach; kol Hashem be-hadar—The voice of God is power; the voice of God is splendor.” We perceive God in one sense as boundless, unbridled power. In another sense, we perceive Him in terms of values, of truth and goodness. … Hadar is presumably some kind of objective beauty, a moral beauty, a beauty of truth.
But that is moral beauty, not visual or sonorous beauty as in the Christian definition.
]In the all of the Tanakh we find God and beauty mentioned only once in the same verse: “I have observed the task which God has given the sons of man to be concerned with: He made everything beautiful in its time; He also put an enigma [ha–Olam] into their mind [b’libam] so that man cannot comprehend what God has done from beginning to end” (Kohelet 3:11, Artscroll translation). What Artscroll translates (following the Targum) as “enigma” and Koren as “mystery,” ha-Olam, is rendered in its more common usage as “eternity” in other translations. Ibn Ezra supports the latter reading, noting that in the whole of the Tanakh, the word olam is used only in the sense of time and eternity. Perhaps the ambiguity sheds light on the implicit Jewish understanding of beauty.
Kohelet tells us is that beauty comes from God. We are obligated to say the blessing “shekakha lo b’olamo” when we see beautiful things. But God made things beautiful in their time. Creation is contingent; even the world itself will wear out like a suit of clothes, and God will replace it (Tehillim 102:26). Beauty is not an eternal characteristic of nature in its recondite essence, accessible to the adept through special knowledge, as Plato taught; much less is it an attribute of God. Beauty, rather, is temporal and hevel, or “fleeting” (rather than “vain” as Kohelet is usually rendered).
Next to this terse statement about beauty we find a statement about man, namely that God has put an enigma (eternity) into the minds of humans such that we seek after eternity, even if we cannot fully comprehend it. This reading of Kohelet 3:10 gains clarity if we read Kohelet 3:15 in the Koren translation by the 19th-century rosh yeshiva Michael Friedländer: “That which is, already has been; and that which is to be has already been; and only God can find the fleeting moment.” As I wrote [8] in another context for Tablet Magazine, Rabbi Friedländer might have had in mind the celebrated wager that Faust offered the Devil in Goethe’s tragedy. Faust would lose his soul and will if he attempted to hold on to the passing moment, that is, to try to grasp what only God can find. The impulse to grab the moment and hold onto it is idolatrous; it is an attempt to cheat eternity, to make ourselves into gods.
That is not the standard reading of Kohelet 3:11, to be sure. Rashi comments that the day of our death is unknown, so that a man says, “Perhaps my death is far off,” and builds a house or plants a vineyard. Because the time of our death is concealed from us, we should rejoice with our portion and follow God’s law while we yet live.
But rejoicing in our portion throughout the days of our lives is never quite enough, for eternity is set in our hearts, which is to say that our hearts are set on eternity. St. Augustine paraphrased Kohelet in the opening words of the Confessions: “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until we come to you.” We might think of beauty as an intimation of the eternity that God has set in our hearts. God has planted in our hearts the enigma of eternity, which is the same as the mystery of human mortality, and beauty is an intimation of that eternity. We do not say that God is beautiful, for we have never seen his form. For Jews, unlike Christians, beauty is not an attribute of God, but rather a fleeting human perception of God’s action in the world.
Judaism abhors the program of Matthew Arnold and others who saw in art a replacement for religion. But if we understand beauty through the eyes of Kohelet—as a fleeting glimpse of God’s action in the world—we also understand why we cannot do without it. God has planted eternity in our hearts, but the whole of his purpose remains hidden. All the more so do our hearts require these fleeting glimpses of God’s action in the world.
This may take the form of awe in the presence of natural beauty, which shows us God b’hadar, as in Tehillim 29. But God has made us his partners in creation, and human artists also can create beauty. The risk of emulating God is great. A king may share in God’s glory, as in the blessing for seeing a king (“Blessed are you God, King of the universe, who has given of his glory to flesh and blood”), but a king who does not subject himself to the law becomes a monster who arrogates God’s authority to himself. Artists are at risk of the same kind of abuse of power. From the standpoint of Kohelet, idolatry can exist in time as well as images. A musician who fails to acknowledge the fleeting character of beauty becomes an idolater.
Jews can recognize the beauty in music composed by Christians on explicitly religious subjects, even though we reject the worship of Jesus of Nazareth. Norman Podhoretz is not wrong to love Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. The classical music of the West, from the sacred counterpoint of Josquin des Prez in the 15th century through Brahms, makes Kohelet’s concept of beauty sensuous. It subordinates the musical moment to a teleological goal. That is, Western music creates tonal expectations so compelling that the hearer’s perception of the flow of musical time is guided by a sense of the musical future. Tonality—the system in which the horizontal unfolding of melody in time integrates with vertical consonance—has the unique capacity to generate a sense of the future.
Every tonal work has a goal, the resolution of tonal tension in the return to the tonic by way of a final cadence from the dominant. The Austrian Jewish theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935) identified a “fundamental structure” underlying each movement of a classical composition that maps a journey away from and back to the tonic. The great composers subordinate every element of composition to the goal. Once the composer has created an expectation, it is possible to create tension by prolonging it, or create surprise and even humor by leading in an unexpected direction. Deep expectations of the future act upon memory through the judgment of our mind’s ear.
Popular music written for or derived from dance remains in the ordinary time of heartbeat, respiration, and walking. Classical music, though, can recreate time on two different levels: the quotidian clock-time of duration, and the experiential time of harmonic change. The juxtaposition of time on different levels enables the great composers to give us an intimation of eternity, a sense of the sacred in purely musical terms. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and other great composers, that is, give us a perception of the sacred through purely musical means that are independent of the religious content of the texts with which the music is associated. That is why it should be permissible for observant Jews to enjoy a Bach Passion or the Mozart Requiem, despite their discomfort at the Christian content. It is impossible for Jews to hear the Matthew Passion in the same way that the congregation of the German church heard it, as participants in an ecclesiastical drama, but the music speaks to us nonetheless.
A radically different view of musical time appears with the decay of the Christian West, from Richard Wagner. Wagner remains the consummate bard of narcissistic love, of passion for our own alter ego. Wagner wants to counterpose a love of pure impulse to the covenantal order of traditional society. As Wagner wrote in 1850 to the critic Theodor Uhlig: “Time is absolute nothingness. The only Something is that which makes us forget time.” Where the classical composers subordinated the moment to musical teleology and, in their best moments, evoked sacred time, Wagner set out to destroy time. Whereas classical composition ordered time in the spirit of Christian teleology, subordinating the individual moment to a long-range goal, Wagner set out to undermine the organic unity of classical form. This raises interesting questions about Gustav Mahler, who called Wagner’s music “the great and most painful revelation.” A convert to Catholicism, Mahler often is portrayed as the exemplar of a Jewish composer, although he embraced a decidedly alien aesthetic.
Music criticism has a two-fold task in a Jewish context. One issue is the technical competence and interpretative validity of performance, or the quality of new composition. But a more important issue is the spiritual purpose toward which music is made. If I am correct to argue that the biblical concept of time and eternity underlies the great tradition of Western classical music, then it would be a diminution of Jewish spiritual life to eschew it.
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