Great Mass in C minor

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The Great Mass in C minor by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , KV 427 (KV 6 417a), was created in 1782 and, although unfinished, one of the outstanding Mass settings of European music history. The term “Great Mass” is a later attribute. Formally, the work belongs to the type of Missa solemnis . The original manuscript is in the Berlin State Library / Prussian Cultural Heritage (music department) under the signature Mus.ms. autogr. WA Mozart KV 427.

History of origin

Mozart composed over 70 ecclesiastical works, including a total of 18 masses. The vast majority of it was created during his time in Salzburg , i.e. in the period up to 1781. Most of Salzburg's church works were created in the service of the Salzburg archbishops. Archbishop Colloredo did not love masses for a long time, especially when he had to celebrate them himself. That is why these fairs could not last longer than three quarters of an hour.

After leaving the service of the Prince-Bishop, Mozart moved to Vienna . There he had little to do with church and church music. As a freelance artist, he primarily wrote serenades, sonatas, piano concertos, symphonies and operas.

Nevertheless, in the summer of 1782 he began to write a new mass in Vienna without any external commission (at least nothing has been known about such a commission). The wedding of Wolfgang and Constanze Mozart took place on August 4, 1782 . On August 17, 1782 Mozart wrote: "... in a word, we are made for one another - and God who orders everything, and consequently also arranged this, will not leave us". Elsewhere Mozart wrote that he had "promised in his heart that if he brought her to Salzburg as his wife, he would perform a newly composed mass there."

In this feeling of piety and love, Mozart began composing the C minor Mass, which he wanted to perform on October 26, 1783 in the St. Petersburg Church in Salzburg with his wife Constanze as a soprano soloist. Since there is no documentary evidence for a performance, it probably never happened. The mass might have been intended as a kind of votive offering for Constanze. The incomparable soprano aria Et incarnatus est testifies to this in particular . Mozart did not finish the mass, which gives rise to speculation. One reason for their non-completion may be that the Josephine church music reforms between 1783 and 1790 made it possible for practically no Austrian composer to perform church music with large ensembles, as the musicologist Martin Geck pointed out. Another that in the summer of 1783 their first child together, Raimund Leopold (born on June 17), died on August 19, 1783 with his nurse in Vienna (Mozart and Constanze had been in Salzburg since July 27, 1783) and this was the The entire Mozart family fell into a downcast mood. Subsequently, Mozart reworked the “Kyrie” and the “Gloria” of the 1785 mass into the oratorio Davide penitente .

The C minor Mass is a monumental work that went beyond the scope of Mozart's previous mass compositions. In those years Mozart dealt with the works of Johann Sebastian Bach , which he got to know through the mediation of Baron Gottfried van Swieten and which triggered a creative crisis and overcoming this crisis in Mozart. Not only Bach is behind this work. The Italians of the 18th century also appear transfigured. The fugues at the end of “Gloria” and “Sanctus” show to what extent Mozart filled the contrapuntal style with his own spirit. The “Great Mass in C minor” is Mozart's most ambitious composition in this genre.

Like his last great church music work, the Requiem KV 626, the Great Mass in C minor remained a torso and was not completed by Mozart. Long stretches of the “Credo” and the entire “Agnus Dei” are missing. The first print of the fragment was published by Johann Anton André in Offenbach in 1840 . In 1847 the Viennese conductor and composer Joseph Drechsler completed the well-known fragment for a performance in St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna. Neither the score nor the performance material for this has so far been found. In 1901 Aloys Schmitt attempted to supplement the score with parts from other Mozart masses and to make the work accessible for concert practice. However, this arrangement was often criticized as alien to the style due to the enlarged, romantic orchestra and the inappropriately chosen templates and is hardly used any more today.

HC Robbins Landon presented the first critical edition of the fragment in 1956 in Edition Eulenburg , Zurich; the Urtext edition by Monika Holl appeared in 1983 in the Neue Mozart Edition. In 1987 Bärenreiter-Verlag published a reconstructed and supplemented edition by Helmut Eder (Salzburg) with the assistance of Monika Holl and Klaus Martin Ziegler . Another important edition comes from Richard Maunder ( Oxford University Press , 1990), who for the first time added wood and brass parts to the Credo .

Attempts to complete the missing parts of the Credo and Agnus Dei come from Phillip Wilby ( Novello ), Robert Levin ( Carus ) and Benjamin Gunnar Cohrs ( music production Höflich ). Thomas Cornelius composed a new, independent Agnus Dei for the C minor Mass, which was premiered in 2015 in Stendal Cathedral. The most recent reconstruction and completion comes from Ulrich Leisinger and incorporates the latest research results.

Inspired by the arrangement of Mozart's Requiem for string quartet by Peter Lichtenthal (1780–1853), the Salzburg composer Hartmut Schmidt arranged the Mass in C minor KV 427 also for string quartet.

construction

Kyrie :

  • 1. Kyrie, Andante moderato : choir and soprano solo

Gloria :

  • 2. Gloria in excelsis Deo, Allegro vivace : choir
  • 3. Laudamus te, Allegro aperto : aria for soprano solo
  • 4. Gratias agimus tibi, Adagio : choir
  • 5. Domine Deus, Allegro moderato : Duet for two sopranos
  • 6. Qui tollis, Largo : double choir (8-part choir)
  • 7. Quoniam tu solus, Allegro : trio for two sopranos and tenor solo
  • 8. Jesu Christe, Adagio : Choir
  • 9. Cum Sancto Spiritu, Alla breve : chorus

Credo :

  • 10. Credo in unum Deum, Allegro maestoso : choir
  • 11. Et incarnatus est: Andante : aria for soprano

Sanctus :

  • 12. Sanctus, Largo - Allegro comodo : double choir (8-part choir)
  • 13. Benedictus, Allegro comodo : Soloist quartet and double choir

Notes and quotes

  • The most striking feature of the C minor Mass is its stylistic diversity.
  • The Kyrie begins with five bars of orchestral introduction. Above a plaintive, chromatic downward movement of the basses, the classic “lamento course”, the call of the trumpets (callers to the Last Judgment) rises and leads to the choir
  • The "Gloria" has a playing time of almost 30 minutes and is divided into seven individual movements in the tradition of the former "Cantata Mass", which reveal the following symmetrical structure: "Jubelchor" - Solo - "Schreckenschor" - Duet - "Schreckenschor" - Trio - "Cheering choir".
  • "The Italian lives above all in the soprano solo of Laudamus, the duet of the two sopranos of Domine, with the finest contrapuntal obbligato string accompaniment and the concert-like trio of Quoniam." (Quote from Alfred Einstein )
  • “The tremendous call from“ Jesus Christe ”, the fugue over the“ Cum sancto spiritu ”are sentences from which both the baroque pomp and the contrapuntal,“ learned ”school dust have completely fallen away, and this is perhaps even more true of that Sanctus and the double fugue of Osanna. "(Quote from Einstein)
  • “Qui tollis” for double choir, G minor, with the heaviest orchestral accompaniment, at the widest tempo, was evidently created in its downward-moving chromaticism under the image of the Redeemer, who pulls to Golgotha ​​under the weight of the cross and scourged - it is a sentence equal to the Kyrie of Bach's B minor Mass. "(quote from Einstein)
  • "The turn from G minor to E flat major at the end of" Qui tollis "is for me one of the most breathtaking passages of Mozart." (Quote from Hildesheimer)
  • “The biggest stumbling block for purists in church music has become Mozart's“ Et incarnatus ”, a soprano aria with strings, three obbligato winds and an obbligato organ. It is a Christmas song, presentation of the manger in which the divine child lies, adored by the Virgin, with angels playing music in the background; overwhelming sweetness and naivete. "(quote from Einstein)
  • The passionate Mozart admirer and biographer Wolfgang Hildesheimer (1916–1991) found Einstein's opinion of the “Et incarnatus” strange because “this three-quarter time aria in the Italian style is much weaker than many arias that Mozart in his secular female characters put his operas in her mouth. "
  • There was a lot of puzzling over the reasons why Mozart stopped working on the mass. There may be several reasons for this - perhaps the painful death of the barely two-month-old son Raimund Leopold on August 9, 1783 or the restrictions on church music introduced by Emperor Joseph II , which left little hope for further performances, but perhaps one Mozart turned away from dogmatic Catholicism towards Freemasonry in 1784.
  • In March 1785 Mozart had to take part in a concert of the musicians' society with a composition. For this he used the Kyrie and Gloria of this mass. The mass became an oratorio with the title “Davide penitente”, KV 469, the “Repentant David”, the Italian text of which comes from Saverio Mattei .

literature

  • Günther G. Bauer : Mozart and Constanze visited Salzburg in 1783 . (Salzburg Studies, Research on History, Art and Culture, Volume 12). Salzburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-902582-05-8 .
  • Alfred Einstein : Mozart, his character, his work (1945). German version (original edition): Mozart - His Character, His Work (1947). New edition Fischer TB, 2005, ISBN 3-596-17058-3 .
  • Michael Gassmann (Ed.): Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Mass in C minor KV 427. Additions and completions. Series of publications of the International Bach Academy Stuttgart, Volume 15. Bärenreiter-Verlag Kassel 2010, ISBN 978-3-7618-1918-0 .
  • Ulrich Konrad : The Missa in c KV 427 (417a) by Wolfgang Amadé Mozart. Considerations on the reason for creation . In: Kirchenmusikalisches Jahrbuch 92 (2009), Paderborn 2010, pp. 105–119.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Davide penitente KV 469 on dme.mozarteum.at . Retrieved December 29, 2018.
  2. ↑ Complete Mozart in Süddeutsche Zeitung from August 6, 2019.