Dear Nathaniel,

Subsequent to your telephone call last Saturday, I've been thinking -
meditating - ruminating - about Beethoven's religious music. I listened
for the first time to his Oratorio Christus am Oelberge (Christ at the
Mount of Olives) and listened again to the Missa Solemnis. I postponed
listening again to the Gellert Lieder (Op. 48) and to the Mass in C major.
Beethoven's religious music presents me with a musicological challenge
that I hesitate to accept just now, preoccupied as I am with other matters.
I would obviously want to look at the musical scores, but I would also
want to listen to and to think about the evolution of music and theology
between 1724 - when Bach began work on the B-minor Mass, - and 1823 when
the Missa Solemnis was completed. I would want to know much more about
the religious compositions of Haydn and Mozart, and the function of music
in the public and private exercise of the Roman Catholic religion. I am
trying to remember what religious music has been written subsequent to
the Missa Solemnis, - Brahms' Requiem, Mendelssohn's Elijah are all that
come to mind. I feel helpless when I confront my ignorance.

Listening to the Missa Solemnis, I am struck, figuratively and literally
by the effect of Beethoven's symphonic style, the fortissimo staccato
punctuation with which he ends so many of his orchestral compositions
on the ambience of his religious music. I ask myself what the application
of this style tells about or adds to (his) religious experience. I ask
myself in what manner the Roman Catholic religious experience is modified
in the age of enlightenment. I don't know the answers, and the Missa Solemnis
doesn't provide them for me. Maybe when some day I hear you conduct it,
I will learn.

Jochen