The Topic of the Sacred Hymn in Beethoven's Instrumental Music

Oftentimes in 18th-century opera, religious scenes were embedded within secular plots. Composers, librettists, costume designers and set designers accentuated and magnified the religious nature of the scene to dramatically set it apart from its worldly surroundings. A distinct "religious" style was created from generic characteristics of the sacred hymn. Attributes commonly employed include a chorale texture, soft dynamics, harmonic and rhythmic simplicity and duple meter. Opera composers consistently turned to the I-V7-vi progression to depict exalted states of consciousness because the embodied metaphoric understanding of and reaction to the progression resembles the embodied metaphoric understanding of a "spiritual state." Once the hymn topic was established as a musical sign in opera, it became available to composers as part of a wider expressive vocabulary of musical topics. Beethoven was one of the earliest composers to make use of the topic.