High culture – and the spiritual appreciation of high culture – returned to the Vatican this month. Pope Leo XIV is quietly restoring some recent traditions, such as personally celebrating Holy Mass on Christmas morning, not done since 1994. Earlier this month, he brought back the classical sacred music concert.
Sixty years ago, at the conclusion of Vatican II, some “messages” were read to various groups; one was to artists, including musicians:
The Church of the council declares to you, if you are friends of genuine art, you are our friends. The Church needs you and turns to you. Do not refuse to put your talents at the service of divine truth. Do not close your mind to the breath of the Holy Spirit.
A few months later, in April 1966, St. Paul VI made this friendship manifest by attending a concert at the St. Cecilia auditorium near the Vatican. Four years later, in honor of his priestly golden jubilee, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis was performed in his presence in St. Peter’s Basilica itself.
Post-conciliar papal patronage of classical music reached its apogee forty years ago. St. John Paul the Great, on a visit to Austria in 1983, met the celebrated Herbert von Karajan, who suggested that a magnificent Mass setting should be performed at a Pontifical Mass. John Paul agreed.
In 1985, for the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, Karajan conducted Mozart’s Coronation Mass in St. Peter’s. The Vienna Philharmonic was joined by renowned soloists, including Kathleen Battle. It was the final great moment of the “conductor of Europe’s” career, and the elderly and infirm Karajan received Holy Communion from the Holy Father himself. He would die four years later, reconciled with the Church, with which his relationship had been fraught.
The grand papal concerts continued, with another highlight coming in 1994, when John Paul held a concert to commemorate the Shoah, conducted by Gilbert Levine in the Paul VI Audience Hall. It was a moment of high history and intense emotion. The chief rabbi of Rome sat beside the Holy Father. Richard Dreyfuss recited the Kaddish. Cardinal Jean-Marie (born Aron) Lustiger of Paris, whose mother was killed at Auschwitz, embraced Levine. It was music fulfilling its highest vocation.
Pope Benedict XVI had a high appreciation for music, and was a musician himself, playing Mozart on the piano. It was fitting then that this year the Ratzinger Prize for distinguished achievement in scholarship and culture was awarded to his longtime friend, Maestro Riccardo Muti.
Even better, after something of a suspension of papal concerts under Pope Francis, the prize was conferred by Pope Leo XIV himself at a concert offered by Muti in the Paul VI Hall. He chose Luigi Cherubini’s Coronation Mass of Charles X, composed in 1825. Muti chose the Mass on its bicentennial, a moment in which sacred music itself (briefly) reasserted its presence in the cultural and spiritual patrimony of France after the vandalism of the revolution and terror. Charles X’s coronation was the first since 1775, and the last for the French monarchy.
In receiving the prize, Muti spoke with affection for Pope Leo, recalling his many years as musical director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Muti mentioned that he had conducted Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago, with Cardinal Cupich narrating the work.
Muti further recalled Benedict’s thoughts about sacred music. In 2015, Benedict received in retirement an honorary doctorate from the Pontifical University John Paul II of Kraków and the Kraków Music Academy. He spoke on that occasion of the “three places” whence music comes – the experience of love, the experience of sadness, suffering, and loss, and the encounter with the divine:
The quality of music depends on the pureness and greatness of the meeting with God, with the experience of love and of suffering. The purer and the truer that experience is, the purer and greater the music arising and developing from it will be.
Pope Leo, in conferring the prize, echoed that, quoting a favourite phrase of Benedict’s: “True beauty wounds, opens the heart, expands it.”
That such ideas animated Benedict to the end was confirmed by Muti speaking of his last meeting with Benedict. The pope emeritus had been reading Muti’s “The Infinite Among the Notes” and invited Muti for a visit to discuss it.
“[The words] are by Mozart,” Muti said. “Between one note and another there is the infinite, that is, the mystery, and that is what I seek – not waving wildly on the podium, but what Dante in the Paradiso calls rapture, not understanding.”
“We talked a lot about Mozart,” Muti remembered. “I consider him one of the tangible forms of God’s existence, and since I am a bit argumentative, we talked about all those productions that sometimes tarnish the music.”
“The last words of the Pope I will carry with me until the end of my days,” Muti added. “Looking at me with those heavenly eyes of his, he said, ‘Let us let poor Mozart rest in peace’.”
Muti’s concert and prize were something of a balm for Benedict’s devotees, whose appreciation for sacred music and liturgical culture was not carried on under Francis. The concert, the prize, and the words of both Leo and Muti marked something of return of Benedict’s spirit to the Vatican for a few hours. It was easy to imagine Benedict himself saying what Leo did to open his short address:
Saint Augustine, in his treatise on music, called it the scientia bene modulandi, connecting it to the art of leading the heart towards God. Music is the privileged way to understand the supreme dignity of the human being and to confirm him in his most authentic vocation.
If Leo follows Augustine on that, as did Benedict, then Muti’s concert will only be the first to grace this new pontificate.