Having started to think about appropriate works with which to ponder through the theology of the resurrection in Easter week the plan has been altered by news of the death of Pope Francis. No doubt any pontiff would appreciate a meditation on resurrection as an epitaph, and Francis’s musical taste was both admirable and sufficiently wide-ranging that it is not obvious that what I had been thinking about previously would have to be jettisoned. Nevertheless, I have been reminded that he had said in 2013 of particular piece that ‘it lifts you to God’.

That piece was Mozart’s Great Mass in C minor, and specifically the movement Et incarnatus est, part of the credo.

The Mass was written, in one of the composer’s less crass moments, in thanksgiving for the health of his wife, Constanze, who herself sang the Et incarnatus est at the first performance – if that is the right word, since it was sung in and as liturgy rather than in a concert – in Salzburg on 26 October 1783.

A soprano solo with orchestra, the music demonstrates Mozart’s elegance, and his wit in the placement of phrase endings. In many ways the theological points are less illustrated than in many of the examples discussed in this blog: the soprano has to call on both high and low parts of her register, perhaps reflecting the impossible heights of Christ’s heavenly dwelling stooping to the mundane in the motion of the incarnation. The first de spiritu sancto in a descending line, mirroring the movement of God towards the world, perhaps also ‘flutters’ in an evocation of the form like a dove in which the Spirit appears.

Nevertheless, perhaps illustration is not the main issue in the theology expressed in this music. If we dwell within the music with open hearts, perhaps Pope Francis has it right that ‘it lifts you to God’, the correct and inevitable response to the descent of the Godhead to dwell as one of us. Can music aid us in our meeting of the Spirit’s movement towards our own θέωσις? It is more or less the premise of this blog that we hope it can; and if any music can it is arguably music of this power and luminosity that will fulfil that function.