Forum on Music and Christian Scholarship

“Requiem per me”: Antonio Salieri’s Plans for His Funeral
Jane Schatkin Hettrick, Rider University

Antonio Salieri composed a Requiem Mass in 1804 for his own obsequies 21 years before his death. Advance preparation of music by a composer for his own funeral is an unusual act, undertaken by few other composers. Salieri’s reasons for writing his death mass are unclear. One scholar believes it to be “his way of withdrawing from public life as a composer.” I believe that it may also demonstrate his devoted Catholic faith and concern for his soul in the next world.
Many questions surround the development of Salieri’s plans for his funeral service and music, a chronicle that spanned a period of 17 years. Although he spent his entire career in official musical life in Vienna, holding the office of Hofkapellmeister for 36 years, he entrusted the autograph score of the Requiem to his friend Count Heinrich Haugwitz in Namiest, Moravia, requesting that it be performed in the Count’s private chapel. The composer specified instructions for his funeral in his will, but jotted down different ideas about his “Messa di morte” on a scrap of paper that survives pasted into the autograph score of an unrelated piece of instrumental music. The printed announcement of his funeral arrangements in Vienna contains conflicting information. The well documented performance of the Requiem in Vienna six weeks after the composer’s funeral also does not accord with his written instructions. Altogether, the sources present a confused picture.
Based on my research for a critical edition of Salieri’s Requiem (to be published by A-R Editions), this paper will shed new light on the origin and history of this work. It will also examine the music of the Requiem, considered by many to be Salieri’s greatest piece of liturgical music, and compare it to the important tradition of Requiem masses in the Vienna Hofkapelle.

Holiness and Worldliness: Theologies of Early Black Gospel Music in the Sanctified Church
Awet Andemicael, Yale University

Accounts of the early history of Black Gospel music frequently characterize Holiness and Pentecostal churches as having embraced the style “with open arms,” in contrast to the “timid handshake” or outright rejection afforded by other African American churches. Theologically speaking, this is somewhat surprising. Holiness and Pentecostal churches in the early decades of the twentieth century were strongly opposed to worldliness, based on a privileging of scriptural passages such as 1 John 2:15 (“Do not love the world”). However, many scholars, musicians and lay people have commented on the strong resemblance which the distinctive music used in the Holiness-Pentecostal, or “Sanctified,” churches bore to secular and worldly genres like the blues, ragtime and jazz. For example, Arizona Dranes’ innovative gospel piano style shared many features with barrelhouse and ragtime, and was an influence on later artists ranging from Sister Rosetta Tharpe to Jerry Lee Lewis. In this paper, I consider how Black Holiness and Pentecostals may have reconciled this seeming paradox between “anti-worldly” theology and “worldly” liturgical music. Drawing largely on contemporary writings and later recollections of the period, I develop a model of Holiness-Pentecostal theologies of music. Lawrence Levine's two-fold paradigm of gospel music (“reaching back” to the slave past and “reaching out” to the world) serves as a structural starting point. I proceed to expand Levine's model, and introduce a third element–the “reaching up” of the pneumatological dimension–which, I argue, is foundational to all other considerations. I suggest that the Sanctified Churches’ implied theologies of music may represent more subtle negotiation of the “Christ and Culture” interface than is generally attributed to it.

“A Voice Calling in the Desert”: Spiritual and Cultural Modes of Expression in Mendelssohn’s Psalm 95
Siegwart Reichwald, Converse College

The hushed ending with God’s warning, “Do not harden your hearts,” of Mendelssohn’s Psalm 95 leaves the listener with a haunting sense of inward reflection. It begs questions of purpose and function of this unusual composition: Was it meant as a worship experience? Was the text seen as a stirring picture of another people from a different age? Is this an example of religious kitsch? This paper will look at its contemporaneous reception and the compositional process to offer more complex answers than the common flat caricatures of Biedermeier culture.

C. F. Becker published a detailed analysis of the work in 1842, calling Mendelssohn an artist whose name is already firmly inscribed in the annals of history. Becker spent equal time dealing with compositional details and the spiritual content of the composition. A careful reading of his analysis will show the complexity and subtleties regarding religiosity, faith, and kitsch.

Psalm 95 was one of Mendelssohn’s most heavily revised compositions. After an initial, highly successful performance on 21 February 1839, Mendelssohn nevertheless felt the need for major revisions. It took the composer two years to revise it to his liking, after which he proclaimed it as the best of his four psalms. A careful analysis of the compositional evolution seen in the various sketches, full scores, and piano vocal scores will show a struggling yet determined reformer coming to terms with the Christian message of the Psalm and how to convey that message within the context of his musical and cultural modes of expression.

This dual approach of manuscript study and contemporaneous reception will lead to complex yet specific answers to the questions of purpose, function, meaning, content, and cultural modes of expression.