Celestial Music? Some Masterpieces of European Religious Music. .(Book Review)

Celestial Music? Some Masterpieces of European Religious Music. By Wilfrid Mellers. Woodbridge, Suffolk, U.K.: Boydell Press, 2002. [xv. 320 p. ISBN 0-851-15844-7. $50.] Music examples, index.

In 1936 Wilfrid Mellers started publishing his thoughts on musical matters, and today a partial list of his writings contains well over 150 items. In fact, his latest hook, on religious music, profits from being "a retrospect of material produced over... sixty or more years" (p. ix). Reshaping what he has drawn from this ample stockpile, Mellers has based Celestial Music? on some powerful arguments that spring from a deep familiarity with the masterpieces of Western music combined with an amazing breadth of learning.

He wisely begins by asking "What Is Religious Music?" and in this prologue explains that it is quite separable from liturgical or sacred music. In one of his earliest books a certain piece of vocal church music by Francois Couperin is said to produce "a 'celestial' radiance" (Francois Couperin and the French Classical Tradit ion [London: Denis Dobson, 1950], 157). But such spirituality can shine forth even from purely instrumental concert music, and for Mellers the late quartets and piano sonatas of Beethoven exemplify this (p. xii). Though captured in sound, the transcendent immateriality of these works connects, albeit circuitously, with concepts such as music of the spheres (pp. 308-9). In short, the numinous moments speak of things beyond the simply musical or earthly realms.

The bulk of the book follows a chronological course through a thousand years of European music--from Hildegard of Bingen to Arvo Part, and concludes with Aaron Copland. The series of twenty-eight chapters is broken into five groups that suggest the religious temper of the changing times. At the outset, when organum was a cutting-edge genre, religion firmly bound the community together, though increased self-consciousness made itself felt as early as Guillaume Du Fay's Ave regina caelorum III where an insertion made by the composer names him as a suppliant for God's mercy. Then the second set of chapters shows how, with operatic narrative techniques at hand, an age of more humanistic self-assurance was reached. The best exemplar here is George Frideric Handel's Messiah, in which "it is difficult to perceive any distinction between Glory to Man, and Glory to God, in the Highest" (p. 93). In the third group we see that sonata form principles in music and varied religious beliefs, or lack of them, moved composer s to write highly individualized treatments of sacred texts. The period features orthodox Christians such as Joseph Haydn and Anton Bruckner as well as agnostics such as Gabriel Faure and Johannes Brahms. The last two groups deal with music of the twentieth century and represent conflicting tendencies in the sphere of religious convictions during those years. While the fourth section focuses on British composers from Edward Elgar to Benjamin Britten, the fifth brings forward both English and continental works in which a return to ritual and other forms of impersonalization may be discerned (e.g., in Olivier Messiaen, Igor Stravinsky, Arvo Part, and John Tavener).

Within this grand historical scheme a recurring plan offers a welcome fixity. That is to say, each and every chapter examines in detail a single work or, at most, a handful of them. Not surprisingly, Mellers discusses a number of Masses, including (1) settings of the Mass Ordinary by Guillaume de Machaut, Franz Schubert, and, of course, Johann Sebastian Bach (Mass in B Minor) and Ludwig van Beethoven (Missa solemnis) and (2) settings of the Requiem Mass by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Hector Berlioz, and Giuseppe Verdi. Other liturgical or biblical texts come into play for such pieces as Thomas Tallis's Lamentations of Jeremiah, Claudio Monteverdi's Vespers ...