The “Moonlight Sonata" and the Collective Dark Night of the Soul
Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy, the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am the Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken. When they have again become sober, they have drawn from the sea all that they can bring to dry land . . . Music is the incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.
— Ludwig van Beethoven
Last night I was listening to Beethoven’s piano sonatas played on fortepiano. Then a thought occurred to me. It was about his Opus 27 No. 2 C# minor sonata, commonly known as the “Moonlight Sonata”.
The first movement of Beethoven’s Opus 27 No. 2 C# minor sonata was very popular in Beethoven’s day, too popular, in fact, to the point of exasperating the composer himself. He remarked to Carl Czerny (Beethoven’s student and Franz Liszt’s teacher): “They are always talking about the C# minor Sonata. Surely, I have written better things.” Yet, after more than two centuries, it still remains the most popular and downloaded piece of classical music.
The title “Moonlight Sonata” did not actually come about until almost a decade after Beethoven’s death (1827). In 1836, German music critic Ludwig Rellstab wrote that the sonata reminded him of the reflected moonlight off Lake Lucerne. Since then, the Moonlight Sonata has become the de facto “official” title of the sonata.
Now why is the “Moonlight Sonata” so universally loved?
“Sonata quasi una fantasia” is the title which Beethoven gave to his fourteenth sonata. Unlike the formal Sonata form of the classical period, fantasia commonly describes a free-form classical musical piece. Marking the beginning of Beethoven’s second stylistic period, Opus 27 No. 2 does not follow the traditional sonata form.
Beethoven uses traditional musical mourning devices called Trauermusik (funeral music) in a very untraditional way. Trauermusik consists of Lament Bass, repetitive accompaniment figures, and chant. (Other famous examples of chant are Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music and the Requiem. Dotted monotone anacrusis permeate the first movement reminiscent of the tolling of funeral bells, which anticipates Chopin’s opus 35 Bb sonata’s famous ‘Marche Funebre’ and later the main theme of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony’s ‘Marcia Funebre’.)
Why Trauermusik? What was Beethoven mourning about? In 1800-1802 he experienced devastating internal turmoil in trying to come to terms with his hearing loss. Externally his life seemed to be ideal with his success as a virtuoso pianist and as a brilliant young composer in Vienna. He gradually began to withdraw from society and friends. He was compelled to live in solitude and loneliness due to his impending complete deafness. Yet, the solitude and loneliness would nevertheless have a profoundly transformative impact on his spiritual growth and creative development as a man and as a composer.
The years from 1800 to 1802—his 30th, 31st, and 32nd years—were a period of profound mourning for the lost promise as a virtuoso pianist and the loss of the faculty thought essential for a musician. He seriously contemplated suicide. Yet, those were also the years of transformation, marking the beginning of his second stylistic period. As his outer hearing deteriorated, his inner hearing developed. In a famous letter known as the Heilgenstadt Testament written to his brothers Carl and Johann from Heilgenstadt, Vienna, on October 6th, 1802, he wrote “Thanks to my art I did not end my life by suicide.”
The first movement of “Sonata quasi una fantasia” is indeed Beethoven’s funeral music for his past life and for the kind of future it promised. His inner experience of profound sadness and deep melancholy is expressed in his composition with singularly sublime beauty that transcends his individuality and touches the sensitive heart of all humanity. Who that is sensitive and intelligent in his or her life has not experienced the same kind of sadness and melancholy that Beethoven experienced, albeit perhaps his experience was deeper and more intense than most?
The “Sonata quasi una fantasia” can be interpreted as the expression of Beethoven's effort at attaining an Absolute Affirmation of his life (Nietzsche’s amor fati/love of fate), which led to the composition of his Fifth Symphony (the “Fate Symphony”), composed between 1804 and 1808.
The grief and mourning of the Adagio Sostenuto with its modal changes, dissonances, rhythms, and chants representative of Trauermusik followed by the memory of the youthful joy of the past in the second movement, and ending with his impassioned longing for a triumphant joy of a new future to come in the third movement (which later culminated in the Ninth Symphony). Yet, the sense of sorrow, even at times the emotion of rage, permeate the whole sonata, which are beautifully sublimated to the ecstatic passion for life.
Beethoven would live most of his life in a great deal of loneliness, despair, and pain with multiple illnesses beside deafness, and yet with his tremendous spiritual strength and willpower devoted his genius to the development of his musical compositions. As the “Sonata quasi una fantasia” was written toward the beginning of his second stylistic period, many musical masterpieces would follow, all of which are timeless treasures for future humanity.
Beethoven wrote:
“Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy, the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am the Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken. When they have again become sober, they have drawn from the sea all that they can bring to dry land . . . Music is the incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.”
Ludwig van Beethoven was born in the same year as Georg Hegel (1770) and died in the same year as William Blake (1827). Along with these two contemporary geniuses, Beethoven attained an Absolute Knowledge. As Hegel expressed it philosophically and Blake poetically, so did Beethoven musically. Absolute Knowledge is meta-linguistic or trans-linguistic, transcending both ordinary and formal languages, and therefore can be expressed multi-linguistically, immanent in all languages, from the languages of music and poetry to that of mathematics, and from painting and architecture to philosophy.
The collective dark night of the soul that humanity is now going through resembles the dark night of the soul that Beethoven went through when he composed this sonata. As he saw the new dawn by being the light unto himself, so will we be able to see a new dawn by being the light unto ourselves.
If we are in a general way permitted to regard human activity in the realm of the beautiful as a liberation of the soul, as a release from constraint and restriction, in short to consider that art does actually alleviate the most overpowering and tragic catastrophes by means of the creations it offers to our contemplation and enjoyment, it is the art of music which conducts us to the final summit of that ascent to freedom. ― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel