Abstract

This article surveys how the war-and-peace texts of Scripture have been received in Western art music, with particular attention to the transformation of that reception after the two World Wars. It proposes the working category of acoustic commentary — reserved not for every musical setting of biblical material but for cases in which sound organization, temporal design, and listening position actively reframe the theological or political force of a text beyond simple quotation or illustration. After sketching a prehistory in which biblical war, prayers for peace, and public order could still coexist within relatively stable frameworks (from the L’homme armé Mass tradition through Handel to the first fractures in Haydn), the article traces four dominant acoustic grammars by which these texts are reorganized after total war: (1) direct quotation, whose self-evidence collapses (Schmidt, Pärt); (2) collision, in which liturgical peace-language is put on trial by the reality of war and, in Bernstein, by the polyphony already within the canon (Vaughan Williams, Britten, Bernstein); (3) nonverbal apocalyptic temporality, in which Revelation is received through time-design rather than citation (Messiaen, Martin); and (4) testimony and memorialization, where biblical language is re-summoned from within the experience of violence (Verdi, Schoenberg, Penderecki). Taking Revelation 1:3 — which blesses both the one who reads aloud and those who hear — as paradigmatic, the article argues that musical reception, approached through the axis of sound, constitutes not a decorative afterlife but a deepened mode of commentary on how the canonical text has lived again within history.