Forum on Music and Christian Scholarship

Horatio Parker, Charles Ives, and the Musical Demographics of Heaven
Charles S. Freeman, University of Kansas

Horatio Parker’s oratorio Hora novissima (1893) established the composer’s reputation as one of America’s chief choral composers. The choral cantata The Celestial Country (1898-9) by Parker’s one-time student Charles Ives shows clearly the influence of the elder composer in its choice of subject matter, certain melodic and rhythmic commonalities, and a relatively similar style and structure. Some Ives scholars see in The Celestial Country a bid to be recognized as a pupil of Parker and to establish himself as a scholarly composer of church music.

There are differences between the two works, however, which point to the dissimilar temperaments of the two composers, and which may also point towards divergent attitudes towards the subject matter, the glories of Heaven, or even to distinct religious differences between the two. Parker’s oratorio, on an excerpt of a Medieval Latin poem on the degradation of the world and the glories of Heaven, exploits the resources of the Romantic-era orchestra and chorus, and also appropriates diverse musical styles and allusions to create a varied and colorful portrayal of the beyond. Ives’s choice of text, a hymn by Henry Alford, limits his pictorial and expressive possibilities by wavering between portrayal of the beauties of Heaven and a particular nineteenth-century militancy of text and image. Ives’s reliance upon solo quartets provides less opportunity for the brilliant shades of description found in Parker’s expansive choruses and arias, such as the dance-like ebullience of Parker’s double chorus “Stant Syon atria” or the more hushed eloquence of the a capella fugue “Urbs Syon unica;” Ultimately, Ives’s Heaven, whether due to the composer’s inexperience or inclination, lacks the color and variety of Parker’s. The theological implications of these differences loom large: Heaven as a goal to be attained, or as a place of grace and glory.

Eftychia The Religious Impulse in Schumann’s Scenen aus Goethes Faust
Papanikolaou, Bowling Green State University

Robert Schumann responded to the early “canonization” of Goethe’s Faust with the Scenen aus Goethes Faust (1844-53), a dramatic composition that betrays a mixture of genres and styles and transcends the boundaries between the sacred and the secular. After abandoning his plan for a Faust opera, Schumann chose to treat “the entire material as an oratorio,” albeit of a hybrid form, since it encompasses diverse stylistic elements borrowed from a variety of genres. More specifically, Schumann’s Scenen epitomizes the tendency toward infusing secular literature with a religious impulse, as evident in the Schlußszene of Faust II, a scene clothed musically in sounds that add to the text’s transcendental imagery. Critic Franz Brendel recognized the implications of the music’s unmistakably sacred overtones and, in a review for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, he identified the Schlußszene as the “church music of the future” (Kirchenmusik der Zukunft). Since then the work has defied traditional genre categorization. Recently, Schumann scholar and biographer John Daverio viewed the entire work as an “encyclopedic array of genres: church music, oratorio, horror opera, grand opera, lied, symphony.” In that sense, Schumann’s musical setting may constitute only a reflection of the uncompromising qualities inherent in Goethe’s drama itself.

Although scholars have frequently commented on the idiosyncratic nature of the Scenen aus Goethes Faust, little attention has been given to the oratorio’s allegorical engagement with the tumultuous political atmosphere framing its genesis and first public performance of the Schlußszene in Dresden on 29 August 1849 (for the festivities surrounding the 100th anniversary of Goethe’s birth). On this 200th anniversary year of Schumann’s birth, I propose to explore Brendel’s statement in the context of the rising dialectic between the sacred and the secular in the long nineteenth century, and investigate the interweaving of politics and religion in the oratorio’s unique musico-dramatic choices. As will be revealed, the Christian imagery presented allegorically in Goethe’s text finds a parallel in the “church-like” music of Schumann’s setting of the Schlußszene, itself a trope on the synthesis of the nationalistic and the religious as evident in German writings of the time.

Jesus von Nazareth, a Poetic Draft in Five Acts: Wagner’s Libretto and the Beginnings of the Historical Jesus Research
Ireri Elizabeth Chávez Bárcenas, Yale University

In the wake of new methods of philological research during the Enlightenment, scholars and theologians in the nineteenth century attempted to reconstruct the life of Jesus from Nazareth based not only in the canonical Gospels, but also on other apocryphal documents and non-biblical sources, and they set out to explore the historical context in which it was written. As a consequence, a critical analysis of Jesus’ life became a popular study subject among theologians and philosophers, and their writings bestsellers in Europe, creating a new imagery which promptly affected the artistic representation of Jesus and the early Christian period.

In 1848-49 Richard Wagner worked on a libretto for a staged biblical narrative in five acts called Jesus von Nazareth. Most certainly, he was inspired by the circulating texts about the life of Jesus and Felix Mendelssohn’s oratorio Paulus. Although he never completed the libretto or the music for the work, the completed scenario and its numerous notes and biblical quotations reflect Wagner’s appropriation of the Historical Jesus image of the time. Strikingly, the scheme of Jesus von Nazareth suggests an unseen humanized depiction of Jesus, and the combination of the opera and oratorio genres which belonged to two separated ambits, the secular and the sacred.

In this paper, I will provide an analysis of Jesus von Nazareth as a contribution to the discourse on oratorio and opera in Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century, Wagner’s own depiction of Jesus compared with the idea of the “Historical Jesus” of his time, and finally, his contemporary writings about art and religion, where Jesus might have functioned as the revolutionary model for his own aesthetical concept of a Gesamtkunstwerk.