Our next concert
Saturday 17 March 2012
at 7.30 pm in All Saints Church, The Drive, Hove
reserve tickets
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J S Bach
Mass in B minor |
Brighton
Orpheus Choir
conductor: Stella Hull
with the Musicians of All Saints
and Nick Milner-Gulland (harpsichord)
soloists:
Emily Armour (soprano)
Bethia Hourigan (alto)
Simon Marsh (tenor)
Yair Polishook (bass) |
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Johann Sebastian Bach assembled the Mass in B minor (BWV
232) in its present form in 1749, just before his death in 1750. The Sanctus
dates back to 1724. The Kyrie and Gloria had been composed as a Lutheran
Missa brevis in 1733 for the Elector of Saxony at Dresden. Completing the work,
Bach composed new sections of the Credo and these pieces were his last major
compositions, finished in the final years of his life, when he had already gone blind. The
complete work was probably never performed during Bach's lifetime, and it has been
suggested that Bach never expected the work to be performed in its entirety. Indeed the
different sections require not only soloists but different combinations of the chorus.
The Mass in B minor is widely regarded as a supreme monument to late baroque
music. The Bach scholar Christoph Wolff describes the work as representing “a summary
of his writing for voice, not only in its variety of styles, compositional devices, and
range of sonorities, but also in its high level of technical polish... Bach's mighty
setting preserved the musical and artistic creed of its creator for posterity.”
Even though it had never been performed, the importance of the Mass in B minor
was appreciated by some of Bach's successor composers — Haydn possessed copies, and
Beethoven is known to have made two attempts to acquire a score. Johann Sebastian’s
son C P E Bach made annotations and corrections to his father's manuscript
of the Mass, while also adding amendments and revisions of his own. It was he who
organised in 1786 the first performance of the last-composed Credo. But it was
only in 1859 that the first performance of the complete work happened. |
Christe eleison
- a duet for two sopranos and violins
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The original manuscript, now held in the
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, shows that Bach divided the Mass into four major sections,
similar to the sections in the Roman Catholic Mass Ordinary. The first section is the
Missa, and includes the Kyrie and Gloria. The second is the Symbolum
Nicenum (or Credo). The third consists of a single movement, the Sanctus,
and the fourth is entitled Osanna, Benedictus, Agnus Dei et Dona
nobis pacem.
The whole work is thus something of an enigma – a sacred work in Latin composed by a
Protestant that follows neither the Roman nor the Lutheran liturgy. This is partly
explained by its historical origins in the 1730s. Bach dedicated the Kyrie and Crucifixus
of the original Missa brevis to Friedrich August II, Elector of Saxony. Though Saxony was
fervently Lutheran Protestant, August I had converted to Catholicism (abandoning his wife
who would not convert) in order to accept the crown of Poland, and his successor August II
followed suit. So the Dresden Court was officially Catholic. Bach's Missa brevis
was diplomatically acceptable to both faiths. In the 1740s, the last decade of his life,
Bach gradually became more introspective, producing some of the most profound statements
of baroque musical form. The Mass in B minor is the final
monument both to his faith and to his art. |
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