A cathedral of baroque music, a monument to the divinity, the zenith of the art of composing for all time… These are some of the words written over the centuries to describe the vast Mass in B minor by Johann Sebastian Bach at the end of his tenure as cantor at Leipzig’s St Thomas Church. Though the work is now played in concert halls and churches around the world, Bach never heard it in its entirety. In fact, it was not heard for several more generations. Bach put the Mass together during the last two years before his death as a kind of shrine to this life’s work.
By 1748, Bach was already 63 years old and had nearly ceased carrying out duties at St Thomas’s Church because of health problems. All the more time was then left for his great cycles of compositions such as The Art of the Fugue, The Musical Sacrifice, and the Mass in B minor. It seems that in his waning years he wanted to compile and preserve not only the best of his work, but also the musical style of the Late Baroque. He sensed the arrival of a new era that would cast aside strict baroque polyphony and that period’s fascinating systems and respect for tradition; the time had arrived for the generation of his sons. It may have been for the sake of a universal legacy that Bach, a Protestant, made what was for him the unusual choice of the Latin language, which puts the work alongside the Catholic Masses of the period in what is called the Neapolitan style.
Before immersing ourselves into the work’s fascinating genesis, let us take a moment to consider the chosen key of B minor, which definitely was not the most usual in Bach’s day. According to the baroque typology of keys, which was a matter of true importance for composers and listeners, B minor evoked something otherworldly, intangible, awe inspiring. Bach’s contemporary, the music theorist and composer Johann Mattheson, described B minor as “bizarre and melancholy”. Apart from this Mass, Bach wrote only a few other compositions in B minor (two cantatas, a few sonatas and partitas, and of course the two preludes and fugues from his Well-Tempered Clavier). This implies that the choice of key indicated something special.
How did the whole composition come into being with its nine big arias and 18 choral numbers? Certainly not in the order in which it is heard today. The opening Kyrie and Gloria are of key importance for the creation of the whole work. Such a “Missa brevis”, i.e., a short Mass with just two sections, was a usual part of the Protestant liturgy, although it was often used by the Catholics as well. The Missa brevis was also cultivated at the Sophienkirche in Dresden, which belonged to the elector’s court. In 1733, Bach’s eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann became the organist there. Bach came to Dresden for his coronation ceremony and presented to the new Elector of Saxony, Frederick Augustus II, the score of the Kyrie and Gloria, constituting a complete Missa brevis. The composer may have regarded his gift as a complete composition, but it seems that he had brought it as a “sample” for the creation of a large-scale Mass of a kind that was also performed in Dresden. We do not know whether Bach had hopes of being commissioned to write such a work, but no such commission was forthcoming from the elector. Therefore, it was later in the year 1748 mentioned above that Bach used the Kyrie and the Gloria, jointly designated as a “Missa”, as the beginning of his great Mass in B minor. That he had Dresden in mind even 15 years later is revealed by other attributes of the composition that are typical of music then being performed in Catholic Dresden: the virtuosic horn part and the colourful diversity of numbers employing an alternation and overlapping of solo and choral parts (in the manner of the “Neapolitan Mass”). At the elector’s residence, work was underway from 1739 on building what would become the court’s Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, although it was not finished until five years after Bach’s death. Still, he may have had a majestic work in mind that would be suitable for that church’s consecration ceremony.
Yet another hypothesis appeared recently about the direction where Bach’s Mass may have been heading. The latest musicological research of Bach’s correspondence has made it clear that at the end of the 1740s, a large-scale Mass was commissioned from the composer by Count Johann Adam von Questenberg from Jaroměřice nad Rokytnou, who spent many years working in the service of the emperor. It was supposed to have been played at St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna at a Mass held annually by a sacred music fraternity in Vienna for the Feast of Saint Cecilia. However, there are no sources stating that Bach’s Mass in B minor was played on that or any other occasion.
While Johann Sebastian Bach had the opening Kyrie and Gloria available to begin work on a complete Mass, to complete the setting of the Ordinary in accordance with the firmly established rules, he needed to add the Credo (Symbolum Nicenum – Nicene Creed), the Sanctus, and the Agnus Dei. Entirely in the spirit of period practice and in the already mentioned effort to preserve his worthiest compositions, he chose to make use of musical material from his cantatas or from instrumental concertos that are now lost, to which he added some choral parts. The oldest music in the Mass in B minor is the Sanctus, which Bach composed and performed in Leipzig on Christmas Eve in 1724. In the section Gratias agimus tibi, part of the Gloria, the composer was working with a theme from the cantata Wir danken dir, BWV 29, the Qui tollis comes from the cantata Wer sich selbst erhöhet, BWV 47, in the Credo we find snippets from the cantatas BWV 12, 120, and 170, and the Agnus Dei contains thematic material from an aria in the Easter Oratorio. For the Osanna, Bach used material from the secular congratulatory cantata Preise dein Glücke, gesegnetes Sachsen, BWV 215. (Is it a coincidence that he returned to material from a composition he had written in 1734 in honour of the Elector of Saxony being made King of Poland and Lithuania?) Entirely new sections were then added to the Mass in B minor, such as the Confiteor, part of the Credo, in a unique setting for five voices.
The impression that the Mass makes as an integral whole is evidence of Bach’s skill and genius. It feels as if it had been written all at once. At the same time, however, it is quite stylistically diverse—we find in it the homophonic textures of the Renaissance, complicated imitation, the Italian concertante style, and even hints of dances. Bach’s intention seems to have been to combine the inviolable, sacrosanct elements of church music including its symbolism (including 3/4 time in the Gloria or the symmetrical structure of the Credo with the Crucifixus at its centre as a symbol of the Holy Trinity) with the best that the secular realm had to offer. This also applies to the inventive instrumentation, where usual elements (the use of trumpets and timpani in the Gloria) are supplemented, for example, by a pair of flutes in the Domine Deus, the original discourse of French horn and bassoons in the aria Quoniam tu solus sanctus, or a third oboe in the Sanctus. Bach also handles the vocal parts in an original way, with contrasting interspersions of solos and choir, most markedly in the Credo. The plentiful use of choir is also a link to Dresden, where this was an expectation, whether because of Catholic liturgical practice or because of the financial resources of the elector’s court. From performance practice at Leipzig’s St Thomas Church, Bach was accustomed to the use of choir only in compositions intended for major holidays and special occasions. The complete Mass certainly belonged in that category, thus we find eight vocal parts in the Osanna and other divisions of parts (six-voice choir in the Sanctus), while in the Kyrie II, Gratias, and Dona nobis pacem the composition calls for additional singers (“ripienists”) to support the soloists.
After Bach’s death, there were performances of various parts of the “Great Catholic Mass”, as it was referred to even by the composer’s sons Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel, but we have a mention from Berlin of a first complete performance in 1834. Some other sources say it was not performed until 1859 at Leipzig’s St Thomas Church. In 1845, the publisher Simrock issued the composition in print with the title “Hohe Messe in h moll” (Hohe Messe means “High Mass”). Because of its length, the Mass in B minor is not suitable for the liturgy and belongs in the concert hall. Despite having been neglected at first, for nearly 200 years now it has been serving the purpose for which Bach created it: as a compendium of his inspiring mastery and of the style that he brought to its culmination in his music.
