Sacrum w muzyce romantycznej

Abstract

The purpose of the present essay is to define a special set of symbolical and expressive values found in XIXth century music. The main problem is the relation between romantic music and the sacred. The problem concerns Beethoven's music of the late period as well as that of Schubert and Mahler. The language of romantic music and the language of the sacred are present in European music of the last thousand years. These languages meet at the level of the madness of the heart, the madness of the mind and the madness of beauty. These are at the same time three powerful intuitions: the intuition of direct experience, of metaphysical experience and of aesthetic experience. The discovery of the romantic sacred idiom only took place in the XXth century, when romantic music was studied for its sound, its tempo and its form. J. S. Bach was, however, a precursor of this discovery, in that in his compositions he provided musical counterparts for the states and degrees of the religious life: meditation (the tempo of the music), contemplation (material sound), contemplative prayer (the dialectical "co-playing" of the sound and of the tempo) as well as the experience of the presence of God – a mystical act (form). After hundreds of years of the religious experience in music was taken up by Beethoven (e. g. in the Adagio of the IXth Symphony, in the "Benedictus" from the "Missa solemnis"). F. Liszt cultivated the language of the sacred in music in a systematic way ("Requiem", "Via crucis"). A similar attempt at perfecting the language of sacred can be observed in Wagner ("Tannhäuser", "Lohengrin", "Parsifal") and Bruckner (the symphonies). The last zenith of the romantic idiom can be found in Mahler's music (the Adagio from the IXth Symphony).