W.A. Mozart’s Music and Karl Barth’s Das Nichtige

This article discusses Karl Barth’s use of W.A. Mozart’s music in the doctrine of creation (in Barth’s Church Dogmatics) in relation to Mozart’s music. I propose an approach for understanding how and why Mozart’s music was able to contribute to the theological delimitation of das Nichtige, a key concept in Barth’s theodicy, in a way that Barth’s discursive argumentation could not. Scholars have discussed whether the music for Barth functions as a parable about the Kingdom of God or as a secular artistic statement that feeds into Barth’s theological argument. Whereas Barth may have used Mozart playfully in some places, he uses Mozart strictly as a secular artist in the discussion of das Nichtige. Therefore, it becomes important to establish the extent to which Barth’s use of Mozart is musically well-founded. I use recent musicological discussions of Mozart’s piano concertos as a background for my own description and close reading of the first movement of Mozart’s piano concerto K. 451 (1784), concluding that Barth’s brief and unsubstantiated description of Mozart’s music in the Church Dogmatics can be substantiated to a large extent, precisely as what Barth claimed it to be: an artistic and secular statement, not a theological one.