MOZART: SACRED WORKS
The sacred music Mozart wrote after returning from his ill-starred trip to Mannheim, Munich and Paris in 1779 forms an interesting counterpart to Idomeneo, the major compositional project of his last years of servitude at Salzburg. For despite the severe limitations the policies of Emperor Joseph II placed on the performance of opera seria and sacred music, Mozart's best and most ambitious efforts in both genres maintained a prominent place in his memory throughout his Viennese years. Like any other composer of the day, he knew that these two categories still served potential employers and patrons as the professional measures of a complete musician. When he went to Munich to finish preparing Idomeneo in 1780 he had taken with him the performing materials of his latest masses, K.317 and K.337, and soon after he asked his father to send him the Missa brevis in B flat, K.275 (although none of these seems to have been performed there). After settling in Vienna, Mozart once more asked his father for the masses in March of 1783, so that Baron van Swieten could hear some of his church music. And finally, in 1791 he lent all three of them to Anton Stoll for performances at the Pfarrkirche in Baden-Wien.
Mozart completed the Mass in C major K.317, shortly after his appointment on 17 January 1779 as court organist, dating the finished autograph 23 March 1779. In all likelihood it was performed in early April during Easter services at Salzburg Cathedral. A long-standing but probably erroneous explanation of the nickname "Coronation Mass" (already attached to the work in the 19th century) was proposed in 1907 by Johann Evangelist Engl, the archivist of the Mozarteum in Salzburg. Engl claimed that the mass must have been written for a yearly service commemorating the crowning in 1751 of the miraculous image of the Virgin Mary on the Plain near Salzburg. Karl Pfannhauser, writing in 1963, offered a more credible hypothesis - that the name arose from reuse made of the mass in connection with the festivities surrounding the coronation at Prague of either Leopold II in 1791 or his successor Franz a year later.
In a well-known letter to Padre Martini of 4 September 1776, Mozart contrasted the sort of church music Prince-Archbishop Colloredo demanded of him at Salzburg with the kind he had written and heard during his Italian visits. At Salzburg, a mass was to last no more than 45 minutes, even on solemn occasions when the Archbishop himself officiated and ample musical resources were called for. The terseness of certain segments of K.317 reflects this constraint, as does its generally homophonic treatment of the chorus.
Colloredo's structures enforced "a special study on the composer", Mozart told Padre Martini. By the time of the "Coronation" Mass, the fruits of this study are apparent in the composer's careful control over changes of expressive color. Frequent and genial harmonic feints only partly relieve the tenacious hold of C major on the overall structure. The first serious rupture comes in the Credo with the impressive solemnity of the "Et incarnatus", a dark, modulating Adagio. The Agnus supplies the most striking and sustained area of contrast to the mass's prevailing festive spirit. The oft-noted kinship of the solo soprano's opening F major melody to the Countess's "Dove sono" in Figaro is only deepened at its reprise by the masterly stroke of changing the melody's delicate accompaniment from muted strings to a poignant pizzicato. This was clearly an important movement to Mozart, for it is the only one in which he allowed himself to forget the practical need for brevity.
In his last years at Salzburg Mozart wrote two vespers cycles for use at the cathedral, the Vesperae de Dominica, K.321, in 1779 and the Vesperae solennes de confessore, K.339, in 1780. Both use the same liturgical texts - Psalms 109 to 112, Psalm 116 and the Magnificat canticle, each of these six parts concluding with the doxology. Like the Salzburg masses, both settings respect Colloredo's standing-order for consicion. The key sequence in K.339 is quite varies (C major, E flat major, G major, D minor, F major, C major), and the individual movements are independent enough that they could be - and were - performed separately. The D minor fugue subject of the "Laudate pueri", spiked by a prominent diminished seventh, joins a venerable tradition of learned contrapuntal exercises that will later embrace the double fugue of the Kyrie in Mozart's Requiem. Here the sober stile antico counterpoint, sung by the full chorus throughout, forms an effective foil to the ravishing 6/8 melody for solo soprano of the next movement, the F major "Laudate Dominum". The modern, secular pedigree of this aria with chorus is already palpable in its broad orchestral ritornello, a feature found in no other movement in the Vespers.
The concluding doxologies are never treated as formulaic afterthoughts; rather, each is always integrated in some way into the movement's musical structure. "Laudate pueri", for instance, sets the "Gloria Patri" to the return of the fugue subject, now joined by its inversion in double counterpoint. In "Laudate Dominum" the chorus intones a sympathetic echo of the soprano's melody, more as a poetic extension of the contemplative mood she has established than as a literal expression of the words they sing. The "Confitebor" is the most interesting case. When its triadic main theme attempts a reprise at the words "Sanctumet terribile nomen", it veers off from its expected course at the mention of the Lord's "awe-inspiring name"; later, the musical trope is extended and completed when the opening theme returns intact in the doxology at the words "Sicut erat in pricipio".
The Italian operatic manner held mostly at bay in the Salzburg masses and vespers had earlier poured forth at its most undiluted in the solo motet "Exsultate, jubilate" K.165. Composed in a happy hour at Milan in January 1773, this must surely rank as the most popular of all Mozart's early vocal works. Here he was able to attempt a virtuosic showpiece of unstinted brilliance, secure in the knowledge that he was composing for a castrato voice of international stature, that of Venanzio Rauzzini, who a month earlier had created the title part in Mozart's Lucio Silla at the Regio Ducal Teatro in Milan.
Alfred Einstein has described this three-part motet as "a miniature concerto, with an Allegro, an Andante, and a Presto or Vivace, hardly inferior, in brilliance or 'tenderness', to a true instrumental concerto". In fact, many of the structural and rhetorical features that Mozart was soon to employ in his violin concertos are already worked out in the type of grand concertato aria with which K.165 opens. The second aria, "Tu virginum corona", elicits a rich outpouring of melody; it is in A major, a key associated with soft, warm textures in Mozart. IN the ritornellos the first violins and violas carry the melody at the octave. The closing "Alleluia" is not so much a new movement as a peroration that translates the opening motif of the second aria into the spirit (and key) of the first. The almost unbroken four-bar phrases and simple texture breathe the happy, untroubled spirit of the 18th-century contredanse.
BY Thomas Bauman & Martha Feldman
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