Bach: Mass in B minor

Within a decade of taking up his post as Thomaskantor in Leipzig in 1723, Bach was becoming ever more frustrated with the Saxon citys civic politics. Never one to compromise, he had clashed with the authorities almost from the word go. In August 1730 complaints that he had been neglecting his duties led him to submit a brief but highly necessary draft of a well-appointed church music to the Leipzig council. Inter alia, he pointed out that he did not have sufficient skilled singers and, especially, players at his disposal. Bachs protests fell largely on deaf ears. In October he wrote to an old schoolfriend, Georg Erdmann, asking about the possibility of a post in Danzig, adding that the Leipzig authorities are very strange and little interested in music, so that I have to live amid almost constant vexation, envy and persecution. Bachs official role was as teacher-cum-music director, with duties that included giving Latin instruction to the boys in St Thomass School. For Bürgermeister Jakob Born and others on the city council, the composer was behaving like a Kapellmeister with attitude, one who had tasted too much renown for his own good.

Bach remained in his Leipzig post until the end of his life. But after devoting himself intensively to the production of music for the Lutheran liturgy, his creative focus shifted: to the citys Collegium Musicuman ensemble of students and professionals which held weekly concerts in Gottfried Zimmermanns fashionable coffee houseand to the world beyond Leipzig. Above all, Bach avidly cultivated his ties with the Dresden court, whose lavish musical resources he had highlighted in his memorandum to the Leipzig authorities. In July 1733 he travelled to the Saxon capital in the hope of obtaining a court title from the new Elector, Friedrich August II, that would in turn enhance his status in Leipzig. In his portfolio was a recently composed Missa (consisting of the Kyrie and Gloria), offered to the Elector in what seem to us toe-curlingly obsequious terms: In deepest Devotion I present to your Royal Highness this trifling product of the science which I have acquired in Musique, with the most humble request that you will deign to regard it not according to the imperfection of its Composition, but with a most gracious eye, in accordance with your world-renowned Clemency, and thus take me into your most mighty Protection.

In the event Bach was not granted the honorary title of Court Composer to the Saxon Elector and King of Poland until 1736, after flattering August II and his family with a stream of homage cantatas. By then the trifling product had probably been heard at least once in Catholic Dresden, perhaps, as the Bach scholar Christoph Wolff has proposed, during Bachs visit in the summer of 1733. Nor is a performance in Protestant Leipzig out of the question. The Kyrie and Gloria of the Mass Ordinary formed part of the Lutheran liturgy at high feasts and special thanksgiving services; and the Missa could well have been heard in one of the citys principal churches. Indeed, parts of the new Missa may have been performed in St Nicholass in April 1733, when Friedrich August II attended a service to receive an oath of fealty from the Leipzigers.

We can only speculate why in 17489, at the end of his life, Bach expanded the Missa into a full Mass, drawing on a six-part D major Sanctus composed for Christmas Day 1724, and movements from assorted church cantatas. (Bach had already reworked a movement from Cantata 29, Wir danken dir, Gott, as the Gratias agimus tibi, and part of the opening chorus of Cantata 46, Schauet doch und sehet, as the Qui tollis.) Certainly, the Mass in B minor, as the Missa tota became known after its publication a century later, was never performed in full during Bachs lifetime. Lasting nearly two hours, the complete work was far too long for performance at either a Lutheran or a Catholic Mass. But its constituent partsMissa, Symbolum Nicenum (i.e. Credo), Sanctus, and the final section comprising the Osanna, Benedictus, Agnus Dei and Dona nobis pacemcould have been performed separately. Perhaps Bach was hoping that the work would be taken up in Dresden. One scholar has recently proposed a Viennese connection to the Mass, with a St Cecilias Day performance in St Stephens Cathedral organized by Bachs acquaintance Count Johann Adam von Questenberg. Parts of the Mass may have been heard in Leipzig in the last year of the composers life. But with no surviving documentation, all this remains speculation.

Perhaps the traditional, Romantic view is nearer the mark after all: that the aged Bach compiled the Mass, unprecedented in its monumentality, not for immediate use, but as an encyclopaedic conspectus of his art and a choral counterpart to The Art of Fugue or the Musical Offering. The first complete performance, in Leipzig, took place in 1859, over a century after Bachs death. When the Zürich music publisher Hans Georg Nägeli issued the Kyrie and Gloria in 1833, he proclaimed them as the greatest musical work of all times and peoples. For Benjamin Britten the B minor Mass was, with its spiritual antithesis, Schuberts Winterreise, one of the twin peaks of Western civilization. He had a point.

The Masss protracted origins, stylistic heterogeneity and use of parodycommon to most of Bachs vocal works composed after 1730, most famously the Christmas Oratoriohave made some commentators uncomfortable. Except for the Sanctus, each of the four sections contains music originally written for non-liturgical purposes. Yet Bach forges diversity into a mighty unity, with a balance of keys, centred on B minor and, especially, D major, with its attendant trumpets and drums. The multi-movement Gloria and Symbolum Nicenum have comparable symmetrical structures, while Bach confirms the unity of the whole Mass by bringing back the D major Gratias agimus tibi as the Dona nobis pacem: a joyous final resolution of the grieving Agnus Dei, and, beyond it, of the tortuous opening B minor Kyrie.

Throughout the B minor Mass Bach juxtaposes the most varied musical styles, as Mozart was to do in his unfinished C minor Mass nearly half a century later. (Coincidentally, these are the only two Masses routinely identified by their key alone, their composers name superfluous!) The Christe eleison duet, with its suave, galant phraseology and carolling thirds for the soprano soloists (just the kind of thing to appeal in fashionably up-to-date Dresden) comes between two contrasting Kyrie settings. The first Kyrie, for five-part chorus, follows a mighty exordium for full choirperhaps the most thrilling opening of any sacred workwith a sombrely magnificent fugue on an angular chromatic subject expressive of penitential awe. In a soundscape that combines maximum complexity with intense beauty, the orchestra (pairs of flutes, oboes damore and bassoons, plus strings) is often independent of the voices, creating textures of up to seven parts. Bach draws on the stile antico for the second Kyrie, an austere fugue in four parts, with the voices doubled by the instruments throughout. Not for the only time in Bachs music, the fugue subject here traces the outline of a cross.

Subsequent sections of the Mass show a similar stylistic disjunction. Several German scholars have surmised that the rollicking D major opening section of the Gloria in excelsis Deo, like a celestial Passepied, may derive from a lost instrumental concerto. Later in the Gloria, the Gratias agimus tibi, beginning in the old Palestrina style and ending in trumpet-festooned splendour, contrasts both with the galant soprano aria Laudamus te, with its florid solo violin part (more concerto influence here), and the lilting duet Domine Deus. Here Bach sets the solo soprano and tenor against an enchantingand decidedly galanttapestry of airil