Music’s debt to Pope Benedict

One group delighted with the papacy of Benedict XVI was musicians. He was one of us. He had a grand piano in his apartment in the Vatican and played (mostly his beloved Mozart) regularly. His love of music was not restricted to music for the liturgy. He saw the numinous dimension to music in its secular forms too. When, two years after his renunciation, he received an Honorary Doctorate from the Pontifical University of John Paul II in Kraków, he chose to give his lecture on music. These words stand out to me: ‘In no other cultural ambit is there music of equal grandeur to that born in the ambit of the Christian faith: from Palestrina to Bach, to Handel, up to Mozart, Beethoven and Bruckner. Western music is something unique, which has no equal in other cultures.’ It’s shameful that some professors of music at our most prestigious universities would hesitate to make that point nowadays.

Benedict believed that the greatest works of Christian composers could not have appeared haphazardly but ‘could only come from heaven; music in which was revealed to us the jubilation of the angels over the beauty of God’. He once recounted the experience of hearing Leonard Bernstein conduct Bach at a concert in Munich. He turned to his friend, the local Lutheran Bishop Hanselmann, and said: ‘Anyone who has heard this knows that the faith is true.’

It must have pained Benedict’s heart that music became such a battleground in the Catholic Church after the upheavals of the 1960s. The radical Dutch liturgist Bernard Huijbers (1922-2003) was the forerunner in the new ideas for congregational music in the wake of Vatican II. He made the case that the new principle of ‘active participation’ required a new kind of liturgical music and a new kind of liturgical composer.