"Acoustical Bedlam": A Contextualization of Beethoven's Christus

Authors

Leanna R. York, Indiana University, BloomingtonFollow

Abstract

The premiere of Beethoven’s Christus am Ölberge at the Theater an der Wien on April 5, 1803, marked the composer’s first and only contribution to the complex tradition of the German oratorio. Since the genre’s inception at the turn of the eighteenth century, it reflected artistic, literary, and theological controversies of its day. Beethoven’s chosen theme, the passion of Christ, came with its own set of ever-shifting compositional and textual expectations, influenced by older traditions of sepolcri and staged oratorios (common in Vienna and at the court of the elector of Cologne after mid-century) and lyric works such as Graun’s well-known setting of Ramler’s Der Tod Jesu. Beethoven’s unique approach to the genre—involving its libretto, narrative setting and characters, stage directions, musical structures—and the work’s mixed reception all reflect controversies of Beethoven’s time and place.

My research brings together networks of people, performances, scores, and literature that shaped Beethoven’s understanding of the oratorio genre. The influence of the empfindsam, lyric style and of Graun’s oratorio particularly are not absent from Beethoven’s setting, as Richard Kramer has shown. And both nineteenth century and modern critics highlight Christus’s dramatic qualities, which were not without precedent in the oratorios that he knew. Modern scholarship positions Christus primarily in relation to the Heiligenstadt Testament, to Fidelio, or to an Enlightened view of the human Christ. However, a reconstruction of Beethoven’s listening environment—through his access to the music library of Elector Maximilian Franz, his relationship with the Tonkünstler-Societät and its regular oratorio performances, and his personal contact with other composers and their works—offers further evidence to consider. In this paper, I lay the groundwork for a much needed recontextualization of Beethoven’s engagement with the oratorio genre, placing Christus alongside its contemporaries to better understand the work itself and its critical reception.

Recommended Citation

York, Leanna R. (2025) ""Acoustical Bedlam": A Contextualization of Beethoven's Christus," The Beethoven Journal: Vol. 37, Article 1.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.55917/2771-3938.1021
Available at: https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/beethovenjournal/vol37/iss1/1