Music, Freedom, and the Decisive Particular

This essay focuses on a major theological shift of outlook between the first rendition of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in Leipzig in 1727 and the Berlin performances of 1829, seen in the emergence of a quest for a particular kind of freedom: ‘freedom from the decisive particular’. We chart some of the background to it in the eighteenth century in ‘natural religion’: in the search for a commonly shared religious sensibility, the suspicion of relying on the local and contingent in religious matters, and in the belief that the universal potential of religion should not be dependent on the historicity of concrete events. These are carried forward in the early nineteenth century, most clearly in the work of G.W.F. Hegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher. The latter, in particular, appropriates music in his account of religion. Music, more than any other art, can give voice to the dynamics of humanity’s primordial religious awareness precisely because of its relative freedom from historical contingencies. Something of this outlook seems to have characterized and informed the 1829 Bach performances. But it contrasts sharply with Leipzig in 1727: in eighteenth-century Lutheranism, it was taken as axiomatic that the events of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ were of decisive, ultimate significance for all other events. The essay concludes with some reflections on what can be learned from this contrast with respect to the conversation between music and theology today.

Music as a Door to the Holy

When we reflect on music and theology, we find that questions about God and religious practice are also questions about deep human emotions: awe, wonder, fear, grief, sorrow, confusion, joy, hope, gratitude, and ecstatic praise. Music can sound the language of the heart before God and neighbor, into mystery and suffering.