Theology of Handel’s Messiah, Beethoven’s Credo, and Verdi’s Dies Irae

In pieces of music set to biblical or liturgical texts, the musical connections of one passage or one movement to one another. In a musical sense, these texts have a meaning and significance that can be and often distinct from the meanings achieved by syntactic relationships. Sometimes the syntactic meanings are lost in the musical repetitions and overlapping entries of many voices; in the case of texts for different movements, syntactic relations often simply do not exist. Consequently, the music does not merely parallel or illustrates the text’s theological meaning or guide an affective response to an already familiar contemplation of God and the Divine presence in the world. Rather, it relates the texts’ images to one another in a specific and particular way and achieves a theological coherence that is distinctive to the particular piece.

The book carries out this approach in analyzing three works of sacred music: The Christmas portion of Handel’s Messiah, the Credo of Beethoven’s Mass in D, and the Dies Irae of Verdi’s Requiem. The analyses show how the composers’ melodic, harmonic, and structural events work on and determine the ideas and images in the texts. The goal is to point to the “heard analogy” that becomes available when listeners pay attention to the musical relationships and their impact on the contemplation of God.