Hearing the Great Mass in C minor in the hometown of its composer
Editor’s Note: Below is an expanded version of a piece published in the current issue of National Review.
Here at the Salzburg Festival, there is a fixed tradition — well, two fixed traditions. Every year, the festival stages Jedermann, the 1911 play by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. It is his treatment of the 15th-century English morality play, Everyman. Hofmannsthal was one of the three main founders of the Salzburg Festival, the others being Richard Strauss, the composer, and Max Reinhardt, the stage director.
The first performance of the festival took place on August 22, 1920. Onstage: Jedermann. I knew a man who was there. He was seven at the time. Vienna-born, George Sgalitzer lived most of his life as an American, serving as a doctor in the Army. He lived until 2006. Exceptional gent.
And the other “fixed tradition” of the festival? Every year, there is a performance, or two, of Mozart’s Great Mass in C minor, in the church of St. Peter’s Abbey. The story goes like this:
Mozart had decamped from Salzburg, his little hometown, to Vienna, the big city. He had married Constanze. He wanted to write a mass in honor of her, and present it in his hometown, where he would also present his wife to his father and sister, who had never met her. (Mozart’s mother had died.) The first performance took place on October 26, 1783, in the St. Peter’s church. Constanze, a soprano, took part.
That is the story, although there are other versions as well. And all of them are speculative. Anyway, it’s nice to sit in St. Peter’s and listen to the mass and think that you are doing so in the place of its premiere.
Mozart wrote another mass in C minor, by the way — the one known as the “Waisenhausmesse,” or “Orphanage Mass.” Mozart wrote this piece for the consecration of a new orphanage church. He conducted a choir of orphans in the premiere. Mozart was twelve, incidentally.
The Salzburg Festival programmed this work in 2020. “As C-minor masses go,” I wrote, “the orphans’ one will always live in the shadow of the ‘Great’ one. But it is a remarkable, splendid work nonetheless, quite apart from the age of its composer.”
As it happens, the Great C Minor Mass is incomplete. It is missing parts of sections that do exist — sections that we have, such as the Credo — and it is missing the Agnus Dei altogether. Why? Have the missing parts been lost or did Mozart never write them in the first place? Again, this is a matter of speculation.
We don’t have good luck when it comes to Mozart masses. Before he could complete the Requiem, he died. But then, what is available . . . beyond price.
Maybe 20 years ago, we had a young man at National Review who had been instructed, as he was growing up, that the Great Mass in C minor was the greatest work of music ever written. I would tease him a little: “How about other masses, forgetting the rest of music? How ’bout the B Minor Mass [Bach]? How ’bout the Missa solemnis [Beethoven]? Hell, how ’bout Mozart’s own Requiem?”
My young friend had never heard those works, or of them. But he was stickin’ to his story, with a proud, and at the same time sheepish, smile.
In Salzburg’s program notes this year, Julian Rushton, the British musicologist, quoted one of his great predecessors, H. C. Robbins Landon. If Mozart had completed his Great Mass in C minor, said Landon, it would stand as “one of the greatest works of art.”
Some of us think it’s up there, regardless.
The Salzburg Festival’s annual C Minor Mass has the air of an occasion. It is some combination of church service, concert, and ritual. St. Peter’s itself is impressive — as a compound. The abbey was founded in 696. (Yes, three digits.) The church was built beginning in 1130 or so. I hope it’s not profane in any way to say that the Peterskeller is one of the best restaurants in town.
People like to visit the cemetery in the compound. Mozart’s sister, Nannerl, is buried there. (She was an excellent keyboard player.) Also buried there is Michael Haydn — younger brother of Joseph, and a composer himself. Sound of Music aficionados know that the Trapp family hid out in the cemetery before fleeing.
Every year, different musicians are assigned the task of performing the Great Mass in C minor. (They have the privilege, it is better to say.) Conducting this year was Philippe Herreweghe, the Belgian, born in 1947. The choir was the Collegium Vocale Gent, which Herreweghe founded when he was still a student. The orchestra was a local band: the Camerata Salzburg. And the soloists? I will say a little about them in due course.
The mass takes around 55 minutes to perform. So maybe that is not quite a full concert, a full evening? The mass had a curtain-raiser, namely a motet by Mendelssohn, Op. 23, No. 3. It sets a famous text by Martin Luther: “Mitten wir im Leben sind mit dem Tod umfangen” (“In the midst of life, we are in death”).
Mendelssohn wrote it in 1830, when he was 21. He was in a Bach phase, you could say. (Who isn’t, always?) The year before, he had conducted the St. Matthew Passion in Berlin. This launched the Bach revival in Germany, and thence in Europe.
He wrote to his sister, Fanny — his own Nannerl — about his Op. 23, No. 3. He described it as “one of the best church pieces that I have written,” one that “growls angrily, or whistles dark blue.”
What striking language. (And don’t you love “one of the best church pieces that I have written”? How many had he written by 21? And this was just one of the best, mind you.)
Philippe Herreweghe led his Ghent choir in a fine performance of Mendelssohn’s motet. It was clean but not clinical. It swelled and subsided appropriately. It was in tune (critically). The motet was holy, and I want to say “medicinal.” There were healing properties in the music.
Then it was on to the main event — the Mozart.
Let me say that Herreweghe is interesting to look at, as well as to hear. He’s a bit of a mad professor, with round, wire-framed glasses and thatches of unruly hair. Kind of a handsome old coot, actually. Intense.
In the church of St. Peter’s, he conducted with a cross right in front of him. It was suspended from the ceiling. I wondered whether he could see certain choir members, and they him.
The choir and the orchestra were just the right size for the church. Would they have been the right size for, say, the Great Festival Hall, a few hundred yards away? I don’t think so. Increasingly, I think that pieces, performers, and venues ought to match. Herreweghe’s forces filled the church satisfyingly.
He is a smart fellow, Herreweghe. He conducted the Great C Minor Mass with blood — with heart — and not only ethereality. He avoided the sin of daintiness. For rhythm, he is a stickler. He was obedient to note values. When his forces got off track, he got them back on.
The mass calls for a vocal quartet: soprano, second soprano (often a mezzo), tenor, and bass. The two women are a lot more important than the men. The second soprano sings the great aria “Laudamus te.” Later, the first soprano sings another great aria — exceedingly difficult — “Et incarnatus est.”
(Rossini might have looked over Mozart’s shoulder and said, “Hey, take it easy on her.”)
The first soprano was Morgane Heyse, of German and French origin, both. She was a substitute. In the early going of the mass, Herreweghe often turned and conducted at her, which I thought must have been disconcerting to her. But she did her part credibly. She was bold in her singing. And I like that she waited for her sound.
Let me explain what I mean: When she released a note, she waited for the reverb, in the church. This is a lovely effect.
The second soprano — the mezzo, in this case — was Eva Zaïcik, from France. She was rich in voice and fairly agile in passagework. A confident, accomplished singer. (Looks a little like Bernadette Peters, too.)
In this work, the tenor joins the female soloists for “Quoniam tu solus.” Then all four soloists come together at the end, for “Benedictus qui venit.” Serving as the tenor was David Fischer, a German (I gather). He sang freshly and correctly.
The bass has precious little to do in this work. He joins the others for “Benedictus qui venit,” and that’s it. I think of something that Michelle DeYoung, the American mezzo, once told me. I had observed to her, “Frankly, I can barely hear the mezzo-soprano in the Ninth.” (Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, whose concluding movement, the choral movement, has a quartet of soloists.) She said, “You know what I tell singers who do that part? ‘Wear a pretty dress.’”
Our bass, Mikhail Timoshenko, a Russian, did not wear a pretty dress. He wore a good tux, however (as I recall), and he showed a beautiful voice, in his moment in the sun — or that shared moment. I might mention too that “our bass,” Timoshenko, is a baritone.
But I am talking trivialities, and the important thing to say is that, in Salzburg this year, we had a strong, smart, uplifting performance of the C Minor Mass. And one left the church that way: uplifted.
The setting had a lot to do with it, right? The premiere, Salzburg, “history.” I would say no. You can be uplifted by the mass when you’re driving through Montana, listening to the radio (if you can get reception). You can be left utterly cold when sitting in St. Peter’s — as I have been, in the past. I remember a cold, rushed, academic performance, with hardly any Mozart in it. Hardly any music.
It is an interesting subject: the relation of place to music. I have been coming to Salzburg for 20 years. For the first ten or so, I stayed in a hotel around the corner from the house in which Mozart was born. It is a tourist attraction. In the second ten, I have stayed in a guesthouse around the corner from the house in which Mozart grew up. It, too, is a tourist attraction, and I can see it right this second, as I look up from my laptop, out the window. Do you know I have never been in either house?
I haven’t the slightest desire to. The walls, the tables, the chairs — a fork that may have been in his mouth: I can’t get interested (though I understand those who do). Music is largely a mental and spiritual and artistic matter.
In 2011, I did a public Q&A here in Salzburg with Trevor Pinnock, the English conductor and harpsichordist. That season, he was conducting, among other works, a late Mozart symphony. It’s funny to say “late,” in the context of Mozart: He died at 35. I asked Pinnock a standard question: “How do you think Mozart would have developed, if he’d had more time?”
We have no way of knowing, answered Pinnock. He then said, “I’m not even sure that Mozart was ever here” — that he ever dwelt among us mortals. He was like some angel-musician, just visiting for a spell.
What a gift, that guy, that composer for all seasons.