Catharsis and Active Listening: Concerning the Spiritual in Music

Sir Guyon with the Palmer Attending, Tempted by Phaedria to Land upon the Enchanted Islands, 1849 (Watercolor and bodycolor, with gum arabic, over black chalk) by Samuel Palmer. J. Paul Getty Museum.

Almost every religious tradition engages with the divine through songs, drums, or the chanting of sacred words. While not all traditions might explicitly call these sounds “music”—and some may resist this characterization—to a Western ear, the resemblance is often unmistakable.

Within the Judeo-Christian tradition, which has deeply influenced Western classical music, singing was originally used to convey sacred texts, declaim them in religious services, and facilitate their teaching. However, music was perceived to offer much more than this. As early as the fourth century, Church Father Basil of Caesarea (329–379) noted that songs were instrumental not only in teaching doctrine but also in moderating emotions and fostering a sense of community and belonging.

Given this profound religious significance, Christian churches were deeply involved in the creation and performance of music, sometimes driving musical innovation while at other times resisting change. Late medieval composers created new polyphonic motets based on ancient Gregorian chants, Renaissance masters like Palestrina wove complex polyphonic textures from these chants, and Johann Sebastian Bach composed deeply religious cantatas and oratorios for Lutheran services.

Basil had already recognized that the power of music extended beyond serving as a vehicle for sacred texts. Music had the ability to control emotions and speak directly to the heart, creating bonds among performers and listeners.

During the Enlightenment, challenges to church doctrines and Christian religion in general catalyzed a significant shift in the perception of music. Philosophers, poets, and novelists began to see music as a spiritual art that provided access to the divine, independently from religious doctrine. Enlightenment figures like Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) expressed skepticism, viewing music as mere decoration without concrete meaning, while others, such as Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) and Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853), believed the abstract nature of music allowed it to transcend language, becoming a genuinely divine art.

This evolving view of music is vividly depicted in the fictional biography of musician Joseph Berglinger, penned by Wilhelm Wackenroder (1773–1798). Berglinger sits in a concert hall, listening to a symphony. He is not only entertained, he actively listens:

Music, for Berglinger, as for many of his contemporaries, has become a source of a spiritual experience, liberating his soul. His mode of listening is the same as if he were in a church—yet the music as well as the spiritual experience are not necessarily related to organized religion. Wackenroder’s short text marks a shift that led to the aesthetic autonomy of instrumental music, later labeled as absolute music; in other words, music that did not require a text to project meaning and significance. In fact, music was able to express the ineffable, the unspeakable that cannot be confined to words.

This aesthetic shift corresponded to a change in the favored genres among composers and listeners. The years around 1800 are the time of the symphony, of the string quartet, and the piano sonata as the leading genres in which composers wrote innovative music.

The spiritual or religious meaning was not encoded in a piece of music via a text. Instead, it was the listener personally who contributed to this experience. The spiritual experience was listener-centered. Composers could (and did) aid this experience by favoring certain textures, timbres, and forms; however, in the end, the spiritual quality of a piece of music first and foremost hinged on the listener.

George Frideric Handel’s oratorio Messiah exemplifies this transitional phase. On first sight, it is a piece of sacred music: the text is religious, compiled from the Old and the New Testament. The subject is Jesus, the Messiah. It belongs to a large group of religious oratorios Handel had written and successfully performed during his years in England. But while Johann Sebastian Bach’s passions and oratorios, which were stylistically similar, had been composed for the protestant liturgy, Handel’s oratorios were from the outset conceived as works for the concert hall. Messiah saw its first performance in the “Great Music Hall” in Dublin in 1743, soon followed by a London premiere in the “Covent Garden Theatre.” The oratorio transferred a religious theme into the concert hall.

While Johann Sebastian Bach’s oratorios and passions were neglected for a time after his death in 1750—surviving mostly in the memories of connoisseurs until the 1820s—performances of Handel’s oratorios continued well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The lasting success of Handel’s oratorios can be attributed—at least in part—to their performance practice. The oratorios, including Messiah, were performed by choirs and orchestras of increasing size. Most famously, a performance during the Handel commemoration in London in 1784, during which the oratorio was presented by 525 vocalists and singers! While not all subsequent performances reached the size of half a thousand musicians, the performance forces for Handel’s music were usually significant (and quite different from modern “historical performance practice”). The result was that the sounds met the ear of the listener with an overpowering force.

Contemporaries described this overpowering force of sensual impressions as “sublime.” The idea had been old, dating back to antiquity. But the aesthetic category of the sublime had seen a revival in the middle of the eighteenth century. Just around the time of Handel’s death, the English philosopher Edmund Burke (1729–1797) had published his influential treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. In Burke’s philosophy, the sublime lies in the overwhelming power of a storm, the intimidating size of a mountain, or the threatening effect of complete darkness. The sublime can evoke horror and fear – but used within art, it also is a source of pleasure.

Handel’s music, with its large performance forces, was heard as being sublime. The same applied to the increasing size and sonic force of the symphonic orchestra. Music that surprised and overwhelmed the listener was preferred over music that was simply pretty.

The sublime did not remain an aesthetic category. Especially in the writings of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, the highest form of the sublime was the divine, and a sublime experience could open the listener for the divine. Later philosophers, such as Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) developed this idea further, deepening the connection between the aesthetic sublime and the divine.

Not only was instrumental music able to express the ineffable; but especially the overpowering force of the symphonic orchestra opened the listener to a sublime experience and thus opened doors to experience the divine. Ludwig van Beethoven’s symphonies represented this new understanding of music with the majestic sound of the Eroica (the Third), the force of Nature described in the Pastoral (the Sixth), and the combined vocal and instrumental forces in the Ninth. But the most influential catalyst for a new view not only of the symphony but of music as a spiritual experience in general was Beethoven’s Fifth, premiered in 1808. The knocking motif at the beginning of the symphony has been described as fate knocking at the door. And it is this “fate motif” that shapes the character of the whole first movement. Departing from the fear and angst of the impending fate in the opening movement (in C Minor), the composer takes the listener on an emotional journey from the lyrical Andante con moto in the second movement and the rhythmically charged Scherzo to the majestic shift to bright C Major in the final movement. As Beethoven stated himself, “Many assert that every minor piece must end in minor. I disagree! … Joy follows sorrow, sunshine—rain.” Beethoven here ties the music to human experience. Contemporaries took this even one step further and experienced Beethoven’s symphony as a religious experience. The composer and novelist E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776–1822) expressed this in his influential review of the work:

Hoffmann expands on Beethoven’s words about joy and sorrow, and he detects pain, longing, and redemption in the motifs and harmonies of the symphony. For Hoffmann (and his contemporaries), these are not only human experiences, but they have a deeper spiritual meaning:

Beethoven’s symphony, a piece of secular music, intended for the concert hall, is now the source for a religious experience. But it is a religiosity that is not necessarily Christian, and it is the music itself that leads to this experience.

While Beethoven’s music allowed listeners to experience religious feelings, and while Handel’s oratorios were performed to great acclaim in the concert hall, Johann Sebastian Bach’s works only saw a slow revival. It took until 1829 for the young Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy to spearhead a performance of the St. Matthew Passion in Berlin, which finally brought Bach into the repertoire of the (more secular) contemporary concert hall as well. This Bach revival continued to gather momentum into the twentieth century, when the doctor, musicologist, and organist Albert Schweitzer who presented the sacred cantatas with Charles Widor with the Paris Bach Society in the 1930s. (Schweitzer would go on to give the keynote address at the inaugural Aspen Music Festival and Goethe Bicentennial in 1949.)

Mendelssohn not only helped revive Bach’s music for the concert hall, but his own compositions were also deeply influenced by Bach’s works. His Reformation Symphony amalgamates this interest in the musical past with the modern symphony. It is also a profoundly religious work: the opening movement features a liturgical melody, known as the “Dresden Amen,” a short, solemn ascending motif that is audible throughout the movement. The symphony ends with an even more noticeable religious reference, as the finale is based on the Lutheran chorale “A mighty fortress is our God.” The religious references reflect the historical context of the composition of the piece, as it had been written to commemorate the invention of printing in the fifteenth century by Johannes Gutenberg.

The religious themes are symbolic references to the golden age of the Renaissance, with Gutenberg’s invention and Martin Luther’s subsequent protestant Reformation. The religious references also have a nationalist significance, since the celebrations in 1830, for which Mendelssohn had written his Symphony, were viewed as a celebration of German cultural identity. And yet, the Symphony is more than a document of emerging German nationalism. In a cultural context that heard spirituality in instrumental music, its religious themes expressed this larger spirituality that transcended denominational and national boundaries.

Listeners who detect the “Dresden Amen” in Reformation will be reminded of another work that uses the same theme: Wagner’s opera Parsifal, where it serves as a leitmotif to signify the Holy Grail. Both in his writings and in his compositions, Wagner contributed to the discussion of the idea of Absolute Music. Wagner viewed his own operas as the logical next step in the development of this aesthetic ideal, which led from purely instrumental music to operatic works that amalgamated the symphonic orchestra with the human voice as well as other art forms, such as poetry and visual art.

It is not by accident that religious themes are present in almost all of Wagner’s operas: the conflict between spiritual and carnal love in Tannhäuser (culminating in the pilgrimage of the protagonist to Rome), the opening chorale in Die Meistersinger, the Germanic religious mythology in the Ring of the Nibelung, and, most obvious, the story about the Holy Grail in Wagner’s last composition, Parsifal. Wagner himself labeled the work a Bühnenweihspiel (Sacred Festival Stage Play). It employs Christian religious themes and imagery; and yet, it would be hard to argue that Wagner makes any doctrinal statements. It is a religious work that invites the listener to join the religious experience—without subscribing to Christian doctrine.

Spiritual and religious themes also appear in Richard Strauss’s symphonic poem Tod und Verklärung. The composition depicts a dying artist on his death bed; he is reminiscing about his childhood, the struggles of his life, and it finally leads to the transfiguration from the “infinite reaches of heaven.” Strauss would not have identified himself as a man of faith. But his music has a spiritual quality, which transcends the boundaries of a specific religion.

The same can be said about Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite The Planets. While being on a surface level a description of the planets of the solar system, it draws on old spiritual and mythological stereotypes, including classical mythology and astrology. On a deeper level, however, The Planets is a meditation about human life: war and peace in the two opening movements (Mars and Venus), old age (Saturn), and finally a spiritual transformation (Neptune), when the piece ends with the sound of the unaccompanied voices of a choir.

The works by Strauss, Holst, and other composers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries build on the transformation of the concert hall into a place of spiritual experience that we can trace back to the last decade of the eighteenth century. Berglinger listens to a symphony as if he were in a church. And composers such as Strauss and Holst write works that aid the listener in this spiritual experience—without setting doctrinal boundaries that explicitly spelled out a theology.

Starting with Beethoven’s Fifth and continuing in the works by Strauss and Holst we also see how general human experiences (sadness, joy, death, fear) are amalgamated with a spiritual perspective that puts these experiences into the context of a deeper spiritual framework.

We can see the same in two more recent works in this year’s Festival. The title of Jennifer Higdon’s orchestral work blue cathedral invokes the name of a place of religious worship. The motive for writing the piece, however, was a very personal one. Higdon’s composition was written in memory of her younger brother (Blue being his middle name), who had passed away a year prior. Listeners can hear fear, moments of hope, and the calm and ethereal ending promises a transformation that takes us to a better place.

Like Higdon, Jessie Montgomery also includes a word associated with religion in the title of her Hymn for Everyone. While the tune of the ‘hymn’ was newly written, it not only sounds like a traditional religious melody but also the treatment of the tone reminds us of chorale variations of the past (and thus ties back to the use of the chorale in Mendelssohn’s symphony). In other words, the composition references the sound of religious music without providing a textual reference for its specific meaning. Instead, it is a hymn “for everyone,” open for all spiritual and religious experiences. Listeners who dig deeper will find that the composition was influenced by the early COVID pandemic (2020–21) and in particular by the passing of the composer’s mother. But even without these references, listeners experience the spiritual depth of the piece, leading, after a dramatic climax, to a sound that slowly fades away. Montgomery has called the experience of writing the composition as being cathartic, and that is how we can hear the work: leading from drama and angst to a spiritual catharsis at the end.

The cathartic efficacy of music ties together many of the works on the program of this festival that have a spiritual character: Beethoven’s Fifth leads the listener from sorrow and fear to joy; Strauss gives a glimpse of transfiguration at the end of life; Holst’s The Planets culminates in the ethereal sounds of a choir; and Higdon and Montgomery both view their creative process as being part of a personal catharsis.

When music became the voice of the ineffable, around the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, it left the specificity of religious text behind. Instead of being a vehicle for words, music offered the listener a path for an emotional journey, which often led from tragedy and fear to either the sublime experience of a majestic apotheosis (as in Beethoven and Mendelssohn) or the transfiguration promised by a calm and fading sound, as in Strauss, Holst, or Montgomery. What connects these pieces is that the listener is not only recipient of a religious text, but also participates in the creation of meaning, thus actively listening to the spiritual potential of the music “as if they were in a church.” — © Markus Rathey