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I recently saw the movie Copying Beethoven. There are very few good films about composers. This is not one of them, although it has the compensation of its "electrifying music," as advertised by the quote from the Seattle Times review on the DVD jacket cover, as if the music had been written for the movie. The film is marred by the conceit that Beethoven's copyist was a beautiful, aspiring female composer. Do we really need women's liberation to understand Beethoven?
Yet the movie had its redeeming moment, which came when Beethoven, played by the excellent Ed Harris, turned to his copyist and said: "The vibrations in the air are the breath of God speaking to man's soul. Music is the language of God. We musicians are as close to God as men can be. We hear his voice. We read his lips. We give birth to the children of God who sing his praise. That's what musicians are. And if we're not that, we're nothing."
I am unaware of Beethoven having said exactly this, but he did write to Archduke Rudolph something similar about the artistic vocation: "There is nothing higher than to approach the Godhead more nearly than other mortals and by means of that contact to spread the rays of the Godhead through the human race." Art, in other words, has a hieratic purpose: to make the transcendent perceptible. The Catholic Church agrees with Beethoven that music is uniquely endowed to do this. In Sacrosanctum Concilium the Vatican Council taught, "The musical tradition of the universal Church is a treasure of inestimable value, greater even than that of any other art."
Pope Benedict XVI also shares this view. In 1985, then–Cardinal Ratzinger wrote, "Whether it is Bach or Mozart that we hear in church, we have a sense in either case of what Gloria Dei, the glory of God, means. The mystery of infinite beauty is there and enables us to experience the presence of God more truly and vividly than in many sermons." How does this happen? Probing even deeper, Cardinal Ratzinger went on to say: "Faith becoming music is part of the process of the word becoming flesh. . . . When the word becomes music, there is involved on the one hand perceptible illustration, incarnation or taking on flesh, attraction of pre-rational powers, a drawing upon the hidden resonance of creation, a discovery of the song which lies at the basis of all things. And so this becoming music is itself the very turning point in the movement: it involves not only the word becoming flesh, but simultaneously the flesh becoming spirit."
From where does the inspiration come to create music at this exalted level? Cardinal Ratzinger answered, "The Holy Spirit is love, and it is he who produces the singing. . . . The Holy Spirit leads us to the Logos, and he leads us to a music that serves the Logos as a sign of the sursum corda, the lifting up of the human heart." That is exactly it, even if not every inspired composer could put it in those words—though I have heard Catholic artists like Carl Rütti do that very thing. Even a composer as vaguely religious as Jean Sibelius said, "The essence of man's being is his striving after God. It [composition] is brought to life by means of the Logos, the divine in art." And as if echoing Beethoven, he declared, "That is the only thing that really has significance."
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