The Orpheus Christmas concert

Saturday 6 December 2003
7.30 pm

at St John's Church, Preston Village,  Brighton

Puccini  Messa di Gloria

with carols and Christmas music
including Gilbert Vinter's Christmas Fantasy

the Brighton Orpheus Choir

with the Sinfonia of Arun
Robin Morrish (leader)

Stephen Brown (tenor)
Stefan Holmström (baritone)

conducted by Stella Hull

The Messa di Gloria was begun in 1876 when Puccini was a young man of 18. Born in the Tuscan town of Lucca to a fourth generation of church musicians, he made his boy soprano debut in the local church of San Martino and received his musical education at the Lucca Music Academy, winning organ prizes there at just 16.

Submitted as his graduation thesis in 1880, the first performance of this Mass on the feast of San Paulino was a resounding success with the public and press alike. Yet this was almost its first and last performance. Inspired by Verdi, the young Puccini was determined to pursue a career as an operatic composer. So the Mass remained unpublished during his lifetime, overshadowed as it was by the theatrical successes of Manon Lescaut, La Bohème, Tosca and Madame Butterfly.

It lay undiscovered until 1951 when the priest Father Dante del Fiorentino was researching his biography of the composer. Reintroduced into Europe in 1952, the Mass met once again with excitement and has thankfully remained in the choral repertoire ever since.

But it had not been forgotten by the composer. Much of Puccini’s creative style and indeed some of his future operatic melodies have their origin in the Messa di Gloria. The final Agnus Dei finds its way into Manon Lescaut and the Kyrie into Edgar.

Designed for large choir, male soloists and orchestra, Puccini crafts with the traditional forms of solemn choral writing, fugue and counterpoint to speak with melodic sensitivity the advanced musical language of his time. The text might be religious, but his purpose is dramatic and his raw material emotion. As he was later to declare: “I have to put real emotions into my music, I have to feel them grab me, shake me.” So it is that his superbly lyrical melodies soar to moments of intense beauty, such as the Qui tollis peccata mundi, whilst the complex Cum sancto spiritu fugue is brilliantly interwoven with the opening music of the movement, to weave a dramatic climax to the Gloria. Moments of great intensity, such as Et incarnatus est in the Credo, give way to the agonised bass solo of the Crucifixus and the dramatic choral Et resurrexit. At times the chorus sweeps in surging unison whilst at others, such as the Domine Deus rex coelestis, it provides a sustained choral accompaniment as the orchestra takes on a melodic life virtually independent of the voice.

The work may have begun as an academic exercise and has moments of great mental complexity but it is, as true Puccini, chiefly music of the heart.

S.H.

Some CD recordings of
Puccini's Messa di Gloria

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