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Mozart, Amadeus and Barth
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Extract
In an article in The Times, published to coincide with the premiere of the film Amadeus early in 1985, the playwright Peter Shaffer said that his own apprehension of the divine was very largely aesthetic. What he meant is illustrated by a remark he quoted from his play Amadeus, on which the film was based: ‘The God I acknowledge lives, for example, in bars 34 to 44 of Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music’, and indeed by the whole of that play. Shaffer’s statement and the view expressed in his work raise some profound theological questions, and provide an interesting point of comparison with a leading 20th-century theologian, Karl Barth, for whom Mozart ranked almost as a Father of the Church. I want to use the comparison between them to raise some questions about the role of the Holy Spirit in creation, particularly the Spirit’s connection with beauty, both in nature and in art.
Shaffer and Barth
Shaffer’s theology is simple: for him Mozart was an instrument of the spirit of God. The remark which he quoted in his article is put into the mouth of Antonio Salieri, the Viennese court-composer, who is depicted by Shaffer as recognizing the spirit of God speaking through Mozart, but led by jealousy to attempt to block this spirit. Early on in Amadeus Salieri says ‘Dimly the music sounded from the salon above ... It seemed to me I had heard a voice of God—and that it issued from a creature whose own voice I had also heard—and it was the voice of an obscene child’ (p. 37).
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- Copyright © 1986 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 The Times, 16th January, 1985. The remark was omitted from the stage version of the play and from the film script. It occurs on p. 119 of the play (London, 1980). from which I shall quote.
2 ‘Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’, in Leibrecht, W. (ed.) Religion and Culture: Essays in Honour of Paul Tillich (New York, 1959). p. 63Google Scholar.
3 This tendency is noted, for instance, by Pannenberg, Wolfhart, ‘The Doctrine of the Spirit and the Task of a Theology of Nature’ (Theology Vol. 75, 1972, pp. 8–21)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and by McDonnell, Kilian, ‘The Determinative Doctrine of the Holy Spirit’ (Theology Today, Vol. 39, 1982, pp. 142–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Barth briefly discusses the role of the Holy Spirit in creation in a number of places in his Church Dogmatics. He says that the Spirit is not the Creator, but is the necessary condition of the creation and preservation of the creature, and that the Spirit's special role in creation is to make the creature such that it is destined to serve God's greater glory (III. i. pp. 57–9; cf. I. i. p. 539.
4 Paris, 1979–80; E.T. London, 1983. Pp. 218–28 of Vol. II are most relevant here.
5 The God of Jesus Christ, trans. M.J. O'Connell (London, 1984), p. 227.
6 See, for instance, St. Gregory Nazienzen Or. 34:8; and Congar, op. cit. Vol. III, p. 153, note 28, for further references.
7 op. cit. p. 200. See also Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord Vol. I, trans. E. Leiva‐Merikakis (Edinburgh, 1982). pp. 320f. for the eschatological character of beauty.
8 See, for example, St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae la. 35.2 and St. Cyril of Alexandria, Dialogue on the Holy Spirit (P.G. 75:1144) and Thesaurus on the Holy and Undivided Trinity 34 (P.G. 75:597). St Irenaeus anticipated such developments in Adv. Haer. IV. vii. 4, V. vi. 1 and V. viii. 1.
9 In our own times Hans Urs von Balthasar, following Barth, has developed an avowedly Christological theological aesthetics (op. cit. above).
10 See my Spirit, Saints und Immortality (London, 1984)Google Scholar, for a development of this argument.
11 Word and Revelation (New York, 1964), p. 162Google Scholar.