It took a long while to make people understand that music instead of being the handmaid of poetry, whose function is merely to reflect the ideas of our spoken language, has a language of its own, which can convey ideas in itself, and that there are subtilties that can be expressed in this manner, which evade one when we come to use our coarser mode of expression.  This is specially in evidence in Beethoven’s later work, particularly in the mass we are now considering.  Wagner frequently compares it to a symphony.  In Zukunftsmusik, he says:  “In his Great Mass Beethoven has employed the choir and orchestra almost exactly as in the symphony;” and elsewhere he cites it as being a “strictly symphonic work of the truest Beethovenian spirit.”

In this work, however, he reaches out toward the infinite to a degree not attempted in the symphonies; his spirit takes a bolder flight; more of the inner nature of the artist is revealed; for the limits which bound him in the symphony were not operative in the mass.  The very mode of projecting the first movement, the Kyrie, shows the splendor of the conception as it took form in his consciousness.  The scheme of the movement can be summed up by the antithesis being presented of humanity, weak and sinful on the one side, and the overwhelming majesty of a just God on the other.  It is a prayer for mercy, the cry of the soul in its extremity; the underlying thought being repentance.  Here we have the embodiment of prayer, of supplication.  A devotional feeling of the most exalted kind pervades it.  The first of the three parts comprising the movement is storm and stress, a knocking on the gates, a De Profundus, an accusing conscience arraigning humanity.  He works out of this vein to some extent in the second part, the Christe eleison, in which the appeal is made directly to the human element of the Godhead.  In the third part, the themes of the first are again taken up, but by modulation they are made to take on a new significance, and bring peace in the end.  Although the movement is cast for double chorus as regards the vocal part, the voices are given a subordinate place, the portrayal being carried on by the orchestra in true symphonic style.  Notable in this movement is the rhythm.  In all the storm and stress, a rhythmic motion, a systole and diastole, a surging to and fro, as of vast masses of beings in the last extremity of peril, is apparent.

To read meanings and design into the work of such a composer as Beethoven is the inevitable result of the transcendent nature of it.  It was seldom that he vouchsafed any explanation of his musical intent in his compositions.  Schindler, who thoroughly appreciated his genius, and who was eager for enlightenment on this phase of his art, was in the habit of drawing Beethoven out, as occasion offered, but it was always a difficult process.  Simple and childlike in most matters, the master was wary and suspicious to an incredible degree when the conversation touched