Gendering the Sublime: Understanding Carl Maria von Weber’s Paired Missae Sanctae (1818–19) as Marriage Pendant Portraits

Abstract

Carl Maria von Weber composed two settings of the Mass for the Dresden court in quick succession. The first of these Masses celebrated the name day of his patron, King Friedrich August I, while the second honored Queen Amalia Augusta and also commemorated the royal couple’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. As he was completing the second Mass, Weber wrote: “The first one is the man, this second one the woman.” The present article argues that the two works musically exemplify the type of relationship that had long been embodied in marriage pendant portraits. In theorizing how a pair of musical compositions may convey idealized masculine and feminine virtues in a similar manner to marriage pendant portraits, my analysis draws upon ideas of the sublime and the beautiful. These complementary aesthetic concepts were regularly employed in the era’s music criticism and discussed in gendered terms. Together, Weber’s Masses form an expressive doubling, a type of aesthetic pairing that Lawrence Kramer characterizes as “a form of repetition in which alternative versions of the same pattern define a cardinal difference in perspective.” Each Mass individually manifests conventional gender traits. Considering them together, however, enriches our understanding of these works by revealing how they illustrate idealized gender roles within marriage.