Whereas music, as embodiment of pure time, can be completed in the transcendence of silence, European music from Bach and afterward conceived this silence as a conviction and tried to exploit its end by leaping in a place where the fire and the rose become one. Fugue is this effort's ultimate place. It aspires to compose counterpointedly all the subjective elements in a world dynamic enough to violate what has been from the beginning considered absolutely unsociable. In a gothic cathedral violation of the sky shows up in the combination of the building's congruity and the domes' urge; in fugue's form the same thing is represented by the combination of the counterpoint's congruity with the tempo. Thus Beethoven could not repeat this leap precisely where he ought to, where faith is tried for ever, on the mount of olives. Gethsemane's night, the extreme place of faith, shattered Beethoven. Moreover, it is not a coincidence that Thomas Mann exposes all of Beethoven's failure just before entering his laboratory: he will thus show that whatever has been appointed to him as a weakness,comprises his very musical offer: the descent into the weakness of music itself.

It happened at the heart of the summer of 1819, the time when Beethoven at Hafner's house, in Mendling, had been working on Missa Solemnis (...) When their master asked to eat, something that happened between twelve and one o' clock, and found the maids fallen asleep and the food burned, he became horribly angry, and he took even less care of the nightly quietness of the house, since, because of his deafness, he could not have a sense of his voice. "Are you not, even for an hour, able to stay awake with me?" he incessantly shouted. In effect, however, it was not one, but five or six o' clock, and the irked maids harried to put their best foot forward, leaving to their edgy master the care to look after himself alone, so that that day he had eaten nothing, not even a breakfast, nor anything else since previous day's noon. Yet, he stayed closed in his room, working on the Credo, that Credo precisely with the fugue (...) The deaf was singing, screaming and stamping his feet to the rhythm of his Credo; it was so terribly moving to listen to him, so that they, who had pricked up their ears, felt their blood freezing in the veins. Faint and frightened they tried to move away when the door opened and Beethoven appeared framed by the door's border — what a face he had? The most horrible! His clothes in a mess, his face's features were so perturbed that they provoked fear; his probing eyes, full of confused absence, they were fixed upon them, giving an impression as if they were emerging from a struggle for life and death with all the hostile spirits of counterpoint. He stammered some inconceivable words and then he burst into charges and complaints about the jumble of the house and about all the people, for having gone out of there abandoning him to die of hunger... (Doctor Faustus, pp. 71-73).

Far beyond the Cantor of the church school of St. Thomas, who consistently delivered his cantatas every week, Beethoven by Missa Solemnis presented the only work in the history of music that experiences the meaning of abandonment and impotence. Furtwaengler is right when he asserts that "We don't find in him [in Beethoven] that loose, I would say: at-the-half-of-the-road, meeting of the musician and the poet, not because he was less but because he was more a musician, more only musician, because the purely musical demands were functioning in him implacable and more strong" (cf. Epopteia, vol. 44, p. 241). Yet, he is not that right when he adds that the use of human voice in the 9th Symphony "Derives only from a necessity rooted on the previous parts, on pure music precisely" (ibid). Beethoven felt obliged to seek an external and transcending justification of his musical work. Since music did not end in God, and since it could not stop to itself, some other destination was required: humanism should (had to find the strength to) restore the fissures of meaning; it was the only solution and Beethoven turned desperately to it. But he did not have enough lowliness to achieve this goal. The theme itself of the 9th Symphony fiercely attacks human language, the supposed savior, and it comes to sound more like the detached concordances of the 9th century German musicality. The Symphony of Joy proves humanism to be the most impotent form of individualism. Music can and must meet human language; the 9th Symphony attests that in no way is it able to fabricate it. In 1822 Beethoven finishes Missa Solemnis; In January, 1824, he finishes the 9th Symphony; in the same year he starts working on the last quartets; 1826, the year in which the quartet "es muß sein" is completed, could be considered the native year of European cynicism in music. The torch will be passed to the Romantics, and from them to the 20th century number-obsessed composers. Gradually, and as music begins to express almost exclusively the great absence, it appears the problem of the relationship between the artist and his public.