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Foreword to the Wipf and Stock Edition

Barth was sometimes asked if his theology demanded a different master in music than Mozart. Barth’s response noted in this volume was emphatically, and characteristically to some, negative—Nein. Regardless of what one makes of Mozart, or of Barth’s view of him (his writer friend, Zuckmayer, found him rather one-sided at this point, and Zuckmayer was not alone), the reader gains a greater understanding of Barth’s theology through attention to his reflections on Mozart. For “the evangelical Christian,” Barth’s fascination with the “Catholic” and “Freemason” Mozart was by no means an anomaly that strikes a dissonant chord in Barth’s theological symphony. Rather, it resonates with the melodic line. Like a magic flute, Barth’s tribute to Mozart serves as a key to unlocking the door to the mysteries of Barth’s view of God’s ways with the world. So, what did Barth hear in Mozart’s music, and how did it resonate with his view of the Creator’s dealings with the creation?

The Protestant Barth—one of the twentieth century’s most prolific theologians—preferred Mozart to Bach with his Christian messages and Beethoven with his personal confessions. For Mozart “does not reveal in his music any doctrine and certainly not himself … Mozart does not wish to say anything: he just sings and sounds.” Like Barth, his Mozart prized objectivity. Such objectivity freed Mozart to resound the secular praises of creation to the Creator.

Freedom within appropriate limits marked Mozart’s music, and Barth’s theology of the Word, too. Mozart’s operatic as well as church music served as the “free counterpart” to the particular word given Mozart. Barth’s dialectical theology of the Word serves as a free counterpart to Mozart’s music and as an appropriate response to revelation. For just as Mozart’s music leaves his listener free, so, too, Barth’s words are intended to free the reader to be truly human in view of the God who comes to us in His Word to free us from having to take matters into our own hands. Whereas Mozart’s music celebrates the wholly other and free God through attention to the creation in its freedom and otherness, Barth’s well-developed dialectical theology of the wholly other God revealed in His incarnate Word celebrates this God’s liberation of humanity and the whole of creation to a life of true creatureliness.

Mozart’s objectivity and freedom not only allowed Mozart to hear creation’s secular praises, but they also allowed him to be playful in his musical mastery with its “iron zeal,” and so be truly human. For Barth, God’s sovereign togetherness with humanity in Christ frees us to be human—nothing more and certainly nothing less—and so provides the space and time for us to be free to work and play and to be in “sovereign submission” to our creaturely endeavors—such as music in Mozart’s case—before the Creator.

Barth’s Mozart, perhaps intuitively in all his naivety, got it. When we get it, when we learn to take God in Christ very seriously and ourselves not too seriously, we will be free to be human, not needing to play God, free to see our work as serious play in view of God’s action in the world, and so truly reflect God’s kingdom work. Barth’s Mozart helps us along the way, and helps us read Barth’s earthy humanity in view of his humane God.

For the mature Barth, “God’s deity …, rightly understood, includes his humanity,” as he would write in the similarly slender but also significant volume, The Humanity of God. While Barth’s early theology may have at times “boxed” people’s “ears,” his intent was always to free humanity to be the creature God made with its distinctive glory through proper attention to the divine glory. With this in mind, Barth’s remark in volume III/3 of the sagely Church Dogmatics referring to God’s royal purposes for the world can stand for the same divine purposes for the world in the young radical period, too: “It is only the heathen gods who envy man. The true God, who is unconditionally the Lord, allows him to be the thing for which He created him.” And so, John Updike is surely correct when he says in the original foreword to Barth’s Mozart: “Karl Barth’s insistence upon the otherness of God seemed to free him to be exceptionally (for a theologian) appreciative and indulgent of this world, the world at hand.”

One limitation of Updike’s account is that he does not reflect upon how Barth’s appreciation for the beauty and richness of Mozart’s music developed over time. Barth’s appreciation for Mozart only deepened with his maturing understanding of Christ’s incarnation and what the incarnation signified for a theology of creation. Whereas Barth views Mozart as the aesthetic apex of transitory reality in Romans II, he sees Mozart’s objective, liberating, and playful music as a reverberating witness to the divine promise of creation’s preservation and transformative perfection in his later works. In volume III/3 of the Church Dogmatics, Barth emphatically states that Mozart’s music echoes repeatedly and most clearly the truth that light “breaks forth from the shadow” and that the divine “yes” envelops and surpasses the divine “no.” Mozart simply made music, and he simply listened to “creation unresentfully and impartially.” And so, “he did not produce merely his own music but that of creation, its twofold and yet harmonious praise of God.” Unlike any other, and using only “little bits of horn, metal and catgut” to “serve as voices of creation,” Mozart was able to hear, and “causes those who have ears to hear … what we shall not see until the end of time—the whole context of providence” according to which the light “breaks forth from the shadow.” As such, Mozart’s music has a place in the doctrines of creation and eschatology.

The same cannot be said for the Christian doomsayer, who unlike Barth and his Mozart, only hears the divine “no.” The otherworldly Christian pessimist who hears only God’s “no” absolutizes the shadow as well as God’s wrath. In contrast, Barth, who conceives God’s wrath as a form of God’s grace, has an ear for God’s preservation of creation in view of its eschatological perfection.

Interestingly enough, the Christian pessimist and optimistic secular humanist have much in common. For a secularist outlook cannot realistically sustain its humanism. While the secular humanist hears a “yes” in creation, it is merely human, and does not account adequately for the suffering and evil in the world and nihilism’s ever-present threat to the creation. Only God can bear the threat of nothingness and deliver on the promise to make humanity free. Like Marcion and Schopenhauer, the Christian pessimist and secular humanist separate the creation and God’s covenantal purposes in Christ. Secular humanism cannot check nihilism’s advance. Such helplessness results from its abandonment of the belief in the creation as benefit and as a gift from God. For when we no longer see life as given to us, but as something we must gain, our existence ceases to have meaning if and when we cease to strive.

Barth would utter an emphatic “no” to all such worldviews in order to sound his even more emphatic “yes” to humanity and creation in view of God’s preservation and transformative perfection of the creation in Christ. Barth’s emphatic “no” permitted him “to be more romantic than the romanticists and more humanistic than the humanists,” as he remarked in “The Christian’s Place in Society,” since for Barth the divine “no” always gives way to the consoling turn toward the divine “yes” in Christ. The same dialectic applies to Mozart. In his tribute to Mozart, Barth says, “he always achieved this consoling turn, which for everyone who hears it is priceless. And that seems to me, insofar as one can say it at all, to be the secret of his freedom and with it the essence of Mozart’s special quality.…” It is also the essence of Barth’s own freedom, special quality, and the key to interpreting his theology.

For Christian humanists and students of Barth respectively, it is important to have an ear for Barth’s Mozart and his music. To expand Updike’s claim at the close of his foreword to the Mozart volume in view of what Barth writes here and elsewhere, “Those who have not felt the difficulty of living”—wholly and humanly—“have no need of Barthian theology; but then perhaps they also have no ear for music”—nor an ear for parables of the kingdom either. For those who have ears to hear, let them hear.

—Paul Louis Metzger