Mozart: Great Mass

Mozart’s Mass in C minor, or the ‘Grosse Messe’, is one of his most beloved choral works. And rightly so: this unfinished mass is grand in scale, intense in expression and surprising in form. A work that balances devotion and drama, with echoes of Bach and Handel, as well as intimate soprano arias that he wrote for his wife, Constanze.

Also on the programme is Beethoven’s Fifth – music so familiar that a single motif is enough. Two masterpieces in C minor, each with a distinct character, each a powerful expression of the human emotional world.

‘I have made the promise and hope to keep it,’ Mozart wrote to his father on 4 January 1783 . ‘When I made that promise, my wife was still unmarried. But as I was determined to marry her shortly after her recovery, it was easy to make that promise. However, as you know, time and circumstances made our journey impossible. The score of a half-mass, which is still lying here waiting to be completed, is the best proof that I wish to fulfil my promise…’

The ‘journey’ to which Mozart refers was almost certainly that from Vienna – where he had settled in 1781 – to his hometown of Salzburg. The ‘promise’ was to compose a major work for Salzburg. The ‘half-mass’ is therefore the monumental mass we know today as the Mass in C minor. It is likely that the journey to Salzburg – which ultimately turned into a three-month stay – also had a personal purpose: to introduce his wife Constanze to his father. After all, his father was not exactly pleased that his son had chosen a bride without his consent.

This letter is the only time Mozart himself refers to the work we know as K. 427. He presumably began work on it in July 1782, shortly after completing *Die Entführung aus dem Serail* – the opera that definitively established his reputation in Vienna as an opera composer. In the summer of 1783, he continued to work on it sporadically. That was, incidentally, a particularly productive year: Mozart also wrote the Haffner Symphony (K. 385), three piano concertos (K. 413, 414 and 415) and the first two string quartets, which he dedicated to Joseph Haydn. These works exude refinement, sparkling humour and a boundless joie de vivre. Worldly, light and effervescent. And amidst all that stands this Mass: an often sombre, almost otherworldly giant.

The Mass was performed on 23 October 1783 in Salzburg – possibly with Mozart himself at the organ. The performance took place in St Peter’s Church, where the work is still regularly performed today during the Salzburg Festival. Constanze probably sang the virtuoso first soprano part. To make the work suitable for liturgical use, Mozart presumably had to insert music from other compositions to fill in the missing sections.

Even in the form in which Mozart left it, the Mass in C minor remains impressive – although it is not a complete liturgical work. Why Mozart left the piece unfinished remains a mystery. In 1782, there seemed to be enough time to complete it, but perhaps not enough to do justice to the enormous ambitions of what was already on paper. Later, other projects simply took precedence. Moreover, Mozart’s talent as a composer of choral music was increasingly less in demand in Vienna.

But an even greater mystery surrounds this Mass: why did Mozart write it at all? By this time, he had been released from his duties at the court in Salzburg and was living in Vienna, where he was scarcely commissioned to write church music. As a token of gratitude for Constanze’s recovery, he could just as easily have written a work with a more clearly practical purpose. The most plausible explanation lies in a significant discovery Mozart made shortly before beginning this work: the music of the late Baroque period, and in particular that of Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel. Their music was often regarded as old-fashioned at the time. For Mozart, however, this discovery came as a shock. It forced him to reconsider his own values as a composer and to ask himself whether a return to the stylistic principles of Bach and Handel might, in fact, be a step forward.

That idea – that music from the past can nourish the music of the present and the future – was by no means self-evident at the time. The public craved novelty above all else, certainly in Vienna. In the fashionable salons, only contemporary music was played. A composer might occasionally perform a hit from a previous season, but a fixed repertoire as we know it today simply did not exist.

If Mozart was indeed going through a Baroque-inspired crisis, he also found a way out of it. This is evident from a series of compositions: the Fantasy and Fugue for piano (K. 394), the Fugue for two pianos (K. 426), transcriptions for string trio of movements from Bach’s *Well-Tempered Clavier*, and, above all, passages from this Mass. Bach’s influence reaches its peak here in the overwhelming double choir of ‘Qui tollis’ and the double fugue of ‘Cum Sancto Spiritu’.

What Mozart ultimately completed for the Mass in C minor are the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo (up to and including ‘Et incarnatus est’), Sanctus and Benedictus. For ‘Et incarnatus est’, he notated the vocal lines, the obbligato parts for flute, oboe and bassoon, and the bass; the string parts were later completed by editors. The ‘Osanna’ lacks the usual second choir and therefore had to be reconstructed on the basis of indications in the orchestral parts

• read Herbert Glass’s commentary on laphil.com

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was composed during one of the most productive periods of his career. The very first sketches date back as far as 1803, but it was not until 1807 that he resumed work on it – in the meantime, he had completed his Violin Concerto and Fourth Symphony. A year later, he completed the Fifth Symphony alongside the Sixth, and premiered them together on 22 December 1808 at the Theater an der Wien, during a marathon concert that he had organised himself. The entire concert lasted more than four hours, with the programme consisting entirely of his own works: the premieres of his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, an excerpt from his Choral Fantasy, movements from his Mass in C, his complete Fourth Piano Concerto, an aria from *Fidelio* and, finally, a piano improvisation.

Meanwhile, the opening motif from the Fifth Symphony is etched into everyone’s memory. This is hardly surprising: it exudes immense power. And it recurs throughout the entire symphony: as a building block of the first movement, where it appears in almost every bar, but also in all the other movements. Beethoven transforms it and places it in a different context each time, like a character undergoing a whole process of development. The rhythmic motif thus propels the entire symphony forward. Two years after the premiere, the famous critic E.T.A. Hoffmann aptly described that energy and cohesion:

Beethoven himself did not give his Fifth Symphony a subtitle; it was his biographer, Anton Schindler, who did so by linking the theme of the first movement to Beethoven’s remark: ‘Thus does fate knock at the door.’ It is by no means certain that the composer was referring to the first movement of the symphony with those words, but thanks to Schindler, the ‘Fate Symphony’ is often interpreted as an autobiographical account of Beethoven’s resignation to fate – his increasing deafness. More likely, the work reflects Beethoven’s resistance to that fate. The combative spirit of the opening motif runs through the entire symphony, and is reinforced towards the end by the transition from D minor to the triumphant D major – a deliberate choice by the composer.

Aurélie Walschaert