PMF Program Notes - August 12, 2006

ALL BACH PROGRAM
Saturday, August 12, 2006

J. S. Bach :: Mass in b minor, BWV 232

Sponsored by Bibs, Marge & Sarah

Program 6

Mass in B minor, BWV 232
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

Composed in 1733 and 1747-1748.

Martin Luther published the text for his “German Mass” in 1526 with a certain reluctance. As strong as were his schismatic theological views, Luther still revered the old traditional Latin language of worship, and he was not eager to replace it with the vernacular. He did so for the simple reason that few worshipers understood Latin. He realized that for his revolutionary religious movement to gain converts, it was necessary that it appeal to a wide audience — an uneducated audience in 16th-century Germany — and it could only do so in their native tongue. However, Luther, himself a composer who supplied music for the early Protestant services, allowed some Latin to remain in the new liturgy, partly to relieve the sting of breaking with the old ways, partly out of necessity. “On festival days,” he wrote, “like Christmas, Michaelmas, Purification, etc., it must go on as hitherto, in Latin, until we have enough German songs, because this work is in its early beginnings; therefore, everything that belongs to it is not yet ready.”

Certain Lutheran service items remained stubbornly in Latin for years. When Bach arrived in Leipzig in 1723, it was customary for the great Protestant churches of that city to include in the order of worship polyphonic settings of the Kyrie on the first Sunday of Advent and the Gloria at Christmas, and plainchant settings of those texts much more frequently. In addition, polyphonic settings of those and other remnants of the Catholic Mass found their way into several of the most important services and celebrations of the church and civic year. Since before the turn of the 18th century, the Leipzig town council had tried to supplant these items with ones in German, but had had little success because they lacked strong support from the local congregations, whose leaders were trained in Latin through their associations with Leipzig University and enjoyed the occasional venture into the old monkish tongue.

Bach had no complaint against the practice of Latin in the Lutheran service. Not only was he interested in Latin church music (he copied and arranged sacred works by Palestrina, Pergolesi, Lotti, Caldara and others) but his talent easily allowed him to produce whatever kind of music was required: instrumental, orchestral or vocal; Latin or German; religious or secular made little difference to him. In the 1730s, he wrote four “Short” Masses, which were probably heard in Leipzig but seem to have been intended primarily for the Catholic court of Count Franz Anton von Sporck in Lissa, Bohemia. These Masses, mostly arrangements of earlier cantata movements fitted with the appropriate Latin text, consisted of only a Kyrie and a Gloria, the two items that would have been most useful for a Lutheran musician, and lack the other Mass sections.

In 1733, Bach had the opportunity to compose another “Short” Mass. The death of Friedrich August I, Elector of Saxony, on February 1st began a period of mourning during which polyphonic music was forbidden in the churches. Plans were immediately begun for the installation of his son as successor, and, as part of the celebration, Friedrich August II was to receive the homage of the city of Leipzig in April. Bach, taking advantage of the time opened up by the lessening of his duties during the mourning weeks, composed grand new settings of the Kyrie and Gloria that would be appropriate to the solemnity of the upcoming occasion. These works were probably performed on April 21, 1733 in the Thomaskirche as part of the official ceremonies, but the Elector, a Catholic, would not have entered the Lutheran church to hear them sung.

Though Bach’s religious and civic motivations cannot be discounted when considering this Kyrie and Gloria — the nucleus of the B minor Mass — he had another, more practical, reason for their composition. In Bach’s time, one of the chief means for a musician to strengthen his public and professional positions was through the granting of an honorary appointment to a royal court. Such awards were not unlike the recognition given today, for example, to suppliers to the British royal houses, who are allowed to display the prestigious seal noting that they are a “Purveyor to the Crown.” Most of the appointments of Bach’s time were von Haus aus (“not part of the household”), and required that the composer supply such music as was demanded and that he attend at court if ordered. Bach had a fortunate run of such distinctions. He came to Leipzig in 1723 as honorary Kapellmeister to his previous employer, Prince Leopold of Cöthen. Upon Leopold’s death in 1728, Bach was awarded a similar position with the Duke of Weissenfels, which continued until 1736. In 1733, with the accession of Friedrich August, Bach made a bid for the most coveted appointment of all, that of Court Composer to the King-Elector of Saxony. To this end, he sent the new Kyrie and Gloria — this “trifling example of my skill” as he called it — to Friedrich in Dresden on July 27, 1733. It is uncertain if the Kyrie or Gloria was performed there, though it is possible that Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, the oldest son of Johann Sebastian, who was appointed organist only the month before at the local Sophienkirche, may have produced the work. At any rate, Bach heard nothing about his request for the next three years, not least because the Elector was busy dealing with demonstrations in Poland against his rule. It was not until November 1736 that Count von Keyserling, the Russian ambassador at the Saxon court and an admirer of the composer, encouraged the Elector to name Bach Hofkomponist — “Court Composer.” Bach paid his respects by giving a two-hour recital on the newly installed Silbermann organ in Dresden’s Frauenkirche on December 1st.

The Mass remained a torso, consisting of only the first two sections, until around 1747, when Bach gathered together some of his existing German-language movements to complete the collection by fitting them with the remaining Latin Mass texts. It was the German custom at that time for men of great learning to gather up their thoughts on a lifetime of work as they approached their last years, compiling a sort of autobiography of their contribution to their discipline. Bach, in his sixties and beginning to have trouble with his eyesight, was not immune to this need for summing-up, and A Musical Offering, the Schübler Chorales and The Art of Fugue were meant as demonstration exercises showing the highest technical skill attainable in the field of musical composition rather than as scores for public performance. The work now known as the Mass in B minor is another that recent research shows must be added to this group. Bach considered this work a compendium of the various ways in which Mass texts could be composed rather than as a single, monolithic span of music. “Bach’s aim,” wrote Christoff Wolff in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, “seems to have been to bring together a collection of large-scale Mass movements to serve as models rather than to create a single, multi-movement work on an unprecedented scale.” Charles Sanford Terry found additional motivations behind the compilation of this Mass: “Two reasons, themselves complementary, moved Bach to expand his original idea. In the first place, the Mass is neither Roman nor Lutheran in intention and outlook, but the expression of a catholic [lower case] Christianity. In the second place, Bach’s genius was Teutonic in its inclination to complete a design. If another reason is sought, it is found in the compulsion to express himself in an art-form which he had studied deeply.”

To the Kyrie and Gloria composed in 1733, Bach added a Sanctus that was originally written for Christmas in 1724, and performed at least three times in subsequent years. The Osanna, Benedictus, Agnus Dei and Dona nobis pacem were all based on the music of earlier cantatas and vocal works fitted with the appropriate Latin text, a process known as “parody.” Only the Credo and Confiteor sections were composed anew in 1747-1748. The resulting “Mass in B minor” is far too large for practical liturgical use (half again as long as Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis), has twice as many movements in the key of D major as in B minor and encompasses a wide variety of musical styles and techniques. Bach might well have been surprised at the modern practice of performing the work at a single sitting (or, perhaps, of performing it at all), and some modern scholars do not suffer this situation gratefully, any more than they do an integrated performance of The Art of Fugue. However, Bach did make some attempt to unify portions of the Mass by recalling music from the Kyrie and the Gloria in the closing Dona nobis pacem. Terry noted the work achieved musical integrity because it is “the design of a superb architect, perfect in proportion and balance. Even in their adaptation, the borrowed movements reveal his creative genius, while a collation of them with their originals exposes the sensitiveness of his judgment and self-criticism.” Whatever scholarly exegesis washes up against the Mass, there remains, first and last, the music, and there is no argument for the performance of this magnificent work that can be made in words that is any stronger than that Bach makes for himself with his notes.

Space does not allow detailed consideration here of the individual movements of Bach’s Mass. It will have to suffice to point out that much of the greatness of this music lies in its synthesis of contrasting elements: of monumental choruses beside delicate solos; of blazing full orchestral sonorities beside intimate chamber ensembles; of the sweeping, transcendent grandeur of the eternal words coupled to music of the greatest personal expression. All listeners find in this work a renewal of their faith, whether it be in the power of a religious belief or in the power of music to sing with a profound beauty across the ages. Wrote Karl Geiringer, “The Mass in B minor is an abstract composition of monumental dimensions, a gigantic edifice conceived by the composer as the crowning glory of his life-work in the field of sacred music.” Hans Georg Nägeli, the Swiss publisher who made the first printed edition of the Mass in 1812, was completely robbed of any adverse comment in the face of such sublime music. He called the Mass in B minor, simply, “the greatest musical work of art of all ages and all peoples.”