Program Notes
This afternoon, we launch David Hodgkin’s 25th year as Artistic Director of Coro Allegro with a gloriously concise masterwork by Haydn, an unfinished Great Mass of astounding scope by Mozart, and in between three prayers for peace of sublime simplicity.
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Te Deum for Empress Marie Therese, Hob. XXIIIc:2
Haydn’s Te Deum in C Major, Hob. XXIIIc:2 was composed between 1798 and 1800 for the Empress Marie Therese (1772-1807), the wife and cousin of Emperor Francis II of Austria, and a passionate patron of music. While no original score survives with a dedication to Marie Therese, letters addressed to Haydn’s publishers refer to “his newest Te Deum that he made for the Empress.”
After the huge success of his London visits, Haydn had returned as Kapellmeister in the service of the Prince Nicholas II Esterházy, required only to contribute works for special festive occasions, including a mass once a year for the name day of his wife, the Princess Maria Hermenegild. The Empress Marie Therese, a great admirer of Haydn, who had collected many copies of his works, was eager to commission a Te Deum of her own.
The “Te Deum,” also known as the Ambrosian Hymn, is a canticle or hymn of praise sung at the end of the Matins service, whose roots go back beyond the 4th century. Due to its themes of thanksgiving and praise, it has often been used to mark secular as well as sacred celebrations. During the Baroque period, musical settings of the Te Deum were commissioned for the highest feast days of both church and court, and sung to celebrate everything from coronations to canonizations to treaties for peace.
In 1796, Emperor Joseph II’s church music decrees limiting the use of instruments in church services were lifted. Haydn’s second setting of Te Deum is part of the astonishing outpouring of church music that followed, also including The Creation and the Missa in Angustiis, (Nelson Mass). In fact, Haydn’s Te Deum was premiered in the fall of 1800, with a reprise of the Nelson Mass in the presence of Admiral Nelson and Lord and Lady Hamilton.
Due to the ominous political and financial climate of 1789, Nikolaus II had dismissed the Feldharmonie, or wind band, favored by his father, leaving Haydn with added challenge of writing for a “dark” orchestra composed only of strings, trumpets, timpani, and organ. For the occasion of Admiral Nelson’s visit, however, the prince hired some of the woodwind players featured in published versions of the Te Deum.
Though also written in time of war, Haydn’s Te Deum is primarily a joyous affirmation of faith. It is a piece about eternal salvation conveyed in a period of minutes, through measures packed with an astonishing display of expressive compositional technique. This glorious succinctness is more impressive when you consider that Haydn sets 29 prose verses of the Te Deum text in those same measures. This is music whose ambition and splendor pushes the limits of our brief appointed span of time.
To set the text, Haydn drew on everything from Gregorian plainchant to Baroque counterpoint to classical symphonic forms. The short work has three distinct sections, an allegro, an adagio and an allegro moderato, which correspond to three divisions of the text. The opening choral passages are based on the Eighth Psalm tone of Gregorian chant, although you might not recognize that from their joyful and vigorous C Major declamation. Transformed echoes of chant can be found elsewhere, as in the virtuosic melismas of the final fugue subject. Haydn centers the Te Deum chant through his emphasis on the text, prosody, meaning and unison declamation by a congregation. Unlike his first Te Deum, there are no soloists. Instead, Haydn employs contrasts to explore the limits of the expressive range of the chorus to bring out all the possibilities of the text.
The first movement is primarily homophonic, meaning that all the parts sing the words at more or less the same time. Despite the sheer amount of text, Haydn’s shifts of choral texture, rhythm, and harmonic colors bring out a multitude of nuanced meanings. For example, he sets “omnis terra” (all the earth) with the complete unanimity of C major octaves, then switches to cascading imitative entrances to let us hear the ranks of angels praising God. Dotted rhythms convey the sharpness of death. A sudden swelling half note blooms from the texture to sing of holiness, while the unexpected repetition of a single word creates both emphasis and urgency.
In the brief but poignant Adagio, Haydn moves between unison imploring lines to staggered hushed prayers, before a descending flow of astonishing chromatic shifts evokes the precious blood shed to redeem humanity. Then we abruptly shift back to joy, as Haydn reminds us with flourishing horn calls of the promise of eternal salvation. The promise offered is then undercut by effects such as a startling diminished 7th chord on “Nos” (us), a cry of communal urgency and fear.
This contrast of faith and fear finds beautiful expression in the remarkable extended double fugue with which Haydn ends the Te Deum. Its subject and countersubject simultaneously contrast the two ideas of the final verse: “In te, Domine, speravi” (In you God, I have trusted) and “Non confundar in æternum” (Let me not be confounded). Haydn sets the first idea - trust in God - through the joy and also vulnerability of the first subject’s virtuosic and eternal 16th-note melismas. The second idea - the fear of being confounded - is set in a syncopated countersubject that interrupts the certainty of the first. The second phrase eventually takes over the first, as the word “Non” (Not) cuts through the texture on another startling diminished chord. A short, beautiful chain of suspensions brings us home to the sustained notes of confidence in eternal salvation that bring the work to a close.
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PRAYERS FOR PEACE
In a world of escalating strife and hatred, and in honor of tomorrow’s Transgender Day of Remembrance, we offer these Prayers for Peace as a momentary refuge, to pause and reflect on what has been, to remember our shared humanity, and to find strength in the promise of what can be.
Bobby McFerrin, The 23rd Psalm
“The 23rd Psalm is dedicated to my mother. She was the driving force in my religious and spiritual education, and I have so many memories of her singing in church. But I wrote it because I’d been reading the Bible one morning, and I was thinking about God’s unconditional love, about how we crave it but have so much trouble believing we can trust it, and how we can’t fully understand it. And then I left my reading and spent time with my wife and our children. Watching her with them, the way she loved them, I realized one of the ways we’re shown a glimpse of how God loves us is through our mothers. They cherish our spirits, they demand that we become our best selves, and they take care of us.”
– “Sing Your Prayers: An Interview with Bobby McFerrin”
Ernest Bloch, From Jewish Life: Prayer
In 1924, Ernest Bloch (1880-1959) composed a triptych of pieces called From Jewish Life, of which the first is “Prayer.” Originally composed for cello and piano and dedicated to cellist Hans Kindler, it has since been arranged for various instruments.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ave verum corpus
Ave verum corpus, written six months before the death of the composer, is one of those pieces that can be described as too easy for children and too difficult for adults. Both the beauty and the profundity lie in the (seemingly) sheer simplicity of the work. There are subtle, yet significant harmonic shifts that occur through the judicious use of chromaticism which support crucial moments in the text, and the short orchestral prelude and postlude gently frame the choral writing. – David Hodgkins
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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Great Mass in C minor, KV 427
Mozart never finished his Great Mass in C minor, but even in its fragmented state, its scope, solemnity, and splendor are stunning. Though less well known, the Great Mass is as mysterious in its own way as the more fabulous myths that accumulated surrounding the Requiem. But unlike the Requiem, famously cut short by the composer’s death, we don’t know why Mozart didn’t finish the Great Mass, or even why he wrote it in the first place.
What we have are fragments: the Kyrie and eight separate small movements of the larger Gloria, both complete; drafts of the first two movements of the Credo; and parts and secondary scores from which editors have pieced together the Sanctus, Hosanna and Benedictus. Mozart never composed an Agnus Dei and Dona nobis pacem. This afternoon we perform the Carus edition, edited by Frieder Bernius and Uwe Wolf, who attempt to fill in the drafts and piece together the fragments Mozart left, but not to compose or construct the movements that are entirely missing.
Here is some of what can be known. The Great Mass was written in 1782 - 1783. In 1781, Mozart had left Salzburg to escape the musical restrictions of the Archbishop Colloredo to embark on a freelance career in Vienna. On January 14, 1783, he wrote a letter to his father Leopold Mozart, mentioning a vow: “As witness that I fully intend to keep my promise, there is the score of half a mass lying here of which I have high hopes.”
But what was the vow that the unfinished mass was meant to fulfill? Constanze Mozart told a biographer that Mozart had vowed to write the Great Mass as a prayer for the safe birth of their first son, which was in doubt. Some have suggested the lovely coloratura soprano aria, “Et incarnatus est” which Constanze is supposed to have sung at its premiere, might be a celebration of her pregnancy. But the date of the letter, six months before the birth, complicates this story. Others have theorized that the Great Mass was a vow Mozart had made to his father to prove his continued piety. Or perhaps it was a peace offering, as it featured Constanze as a soprano soloist, to help reconcile Leopold to their marriage. Still others see the Great Mass as purely musical offering from one composer to the other, a commitment to write a certain scale of mass in what Mozart called “the true style.”
Mozart and Constanze traveled back to Salzburg to see his family, and brought the unfinished mass with them. There is evidence that he kept working on it while there. His sister Nannerl’s diary implies that it was premiered in Salzburg in the St. Peter’s Abbey on Sunday, October 26, 1783. A combination of the musical forces from the court and abbey were hired to perform, as might befit a Great Mass. But more recent scholarship into pitch of available instruments and the paper used for the score throws doubt onto whether the Great Mass was indeed the Mozart Mass performed that day. If it were KV 427, it is not known what movements from other masses Mozart had to borrow to complete the service. Plus, the lavish scale of the Great Mass seems to utterly fly in the face of every one of Archbishop Colloredo’s new musical reforms.
Why Mozart never finished the Great Mass in C minor is another mystery. In 1785, he adapted the music from the Kyrie and Gloria to write the cantata Davidde penitente, K. 469 for the Vienna Tonkünstler Society, but why did he abandon the larger project of the Great Mass? Was he overcome by the death of his son? Was the poignant double choir Qui tollis a working out of this loss? Again, as his son died in August, well after much of the mass was at least drafted, the timetable is not clear. Perhaps Mozart was hoping for a great occasion in Vienna or a position at St. Stephens Cathedral that never materialized. But if he had never had the proper commission, why did he invest so effort into a massive sacred work at a time of liturgical reform against elaborate church music?
Here is something we actually do know. During the period in which he composed the Great Mass, Mozart told his father: “I go every Sunday at twelve o’clock to Baron van Swieten, where nothing is played but Handel and Bach.” In a culture that celebrated live performance by contemporary composers like Mozart, Van Swietan produced a series dedicated to “ancient music” of German Baroque composers. He hired Mozart to transcribe the works of Handel, including the Messiah, and was said to have a copy of Johan Sebastian Bach’s B Minor Mass.
Perhaps the Great Mass in C was in a sense a conversation between Mozart and Handel and Bach and other Baroque composers, a purely musical exercise that he could not ultimately afford to keep doing. You can hear echoes of the great contrapuntal masters throughout the Great Mass, above all in the extraordinary “Cum Sancto Spiritu” fugue that closes the Gloria and the elaborate double choir fugue whose two subjects bring the Hosanna to a dancing conclusion. The Gloria resounds with ceremonial calls that recall the Hallelujah Chorus, while the double-dotted rhythms of the Gratias could almost be a processional from one of Handel’s coronation anthems.
Although there is no proof that Mozart was able to study the B Minor Mass score, similarities abound between the two masses. Like the Bach B Minor Mass, the Mozart’s Mass in C minor is a Cantata mass; the Gloria and the Credo are broken up into smaller sections, which alternate between choruses for four, five, and even eight voices, and solo or duet arias, like
the enchanting Domine Deus. Many have noticed the parallels between the Crucifixus at center of the B Minor Mass, with its alternating dissonant entrances over a string passacaglia, and the same kind of searing dialogue over strings in the Qui Tollis of the Great Mass.
If portions of the Great Mass seem like Mozart’s homage to the counterpoint of the Baroque masters, others offer us a seat in the opera house or concert hall. Et incarnatus est, with its 6/8 pastoral meter, woodwind colors and bravura soprano line, appears to have sprung from the set of Idomeneo. The joyous coloratura of Laudamus Te brings to mind the exuberant operatic flourishes, symphonic form and ritornellos of Exsultate, Jubilate. The ultimate mystery of Mozart’s Great Mass is one of wonder, that this fragmented, unfinished Great Mass should encompass so organically such a dazzling array of historic styles of music, while anticipating the great symphonic masses to come.
Program notes © Yoshi Campbell