PROGRAM NOTES

J.S. Bach – Mass in B-minor

Johann Sebastian Bach Born March 21, 1685, Eisenach, Thuringia, Germany. Died July 28, 1750, Leipzig, Germany.

Mass in B-minor

We now believe that in his final days, Johann Sebastian Bach worked not on The Art of the Fugue, which he left unfinished at his death, but on his great Mass in B minor. It was, in many respects, the summation of his life's work, although at the time Bach could not expect that it would ever be performed, let alone revered. Within a few years the young Mozart was entertaining monarchs with his precocious musical games while Bach's music was all but forgotten. Neither of them would have believed that their names would one day be engraved on the front of our concert halls, for that was not the way the world treated musicians in the eighteenth century.

In 1735, near the time of his fiftieth birthday, Johann Sebastian Bach drew a copy of the Bach family tree. He made a place for himself, and for his many children, among the generations of Bachs whose name was already synonymous with music. Johann Sebastian could readily see that he was not the first, nor would he be the last—for his sons had already seen to that—in a line of composers unique in history. It is doubtful that he made room for Veit Bach—a baker by trade and the first Bach to show musical skill—who died sometime before 1578; he has been rescued by modern musicology, which was also unknown to Johann Sebastian. And it was still too early to trust that any of his own grandchildren would continue the tradition, although Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach, born nine years after his grandfather's death, would, in fact, carry the torch well into the next century.

We have long known Johann Sebastian Bach as the most unassuming of composers—content with his respectable but provincial church jobs, satisfied to work far from the limelight, writing music to please himself, with no aspirations to the larger world or the fame and fortune that Handel, his exact contemporary, enjoyed. But the Mass in B minor is not the work of a practical-minded and humble—if brilliant—workman, and it was conceived not for a church congregation, but for posterity. Although composers did not yet believe that their music would be played long after their deaths—since they, themselves, seldom performed that of their predecessors—Bach evidently wanted to leave something fine and timeless behind. And although, in the eighteenth century, music was written only when it was needed, Bach knew his great Mass would go unperformed during his lifetime, for it fit neither the Protestant nor the Catholic liturgy. The Mass in B minor was, then, an exceptional and deeply personal undertaking. That it has become a landmark of western music would have surprised no one more than Bach, although he would not have argued with our judgment. There can be little question that Bach knew his worth, even if he, like most eighteenth-century composers, dared not think about posthumous fame.

The Mass in B minor was not conceived in a flash; its genesis follows a long and twisted line, spanning two decades and bringing together newly composed music, older Mass movements, and still other music originally written for different purposes but revised for use in the Mass. When the Mass was finally assembled, it represented music written by Bach over some forty years. It is difficult to know when Bach first thought of preparing a monumental setting of the Mass text. Most of the work appears to have been done during the last decade of his life; it occupied him nearly to his dying day.

The first significant installment dates from 1733, when Bach wrote a Missa (the Kyrie and Gloria we now know) to honor the new Elector of Saxony. The Credo (or Symbolum Nicenum) was probably composed in the early 1740s. In both cases Bach resorted to the common “parody” technique—adorning older music with new text—not to save time and trouble but to incorporate the finest music he had yet written into this comprehensive work. Later in the decade, when Bach decided to complete this work-in-progress, he added the massive choral Sanctus he had written in 1724, and reworked a number of earlier pieces as the final “Osanna,” “Benedictus,” “Agnus Dei,” and “Dona nobis pacem.”

It has not been difficult for musicology to track down Bach's working process, but it is harder to explain his motives. This is, after all, the first important Mass written for no apparent practical purpose. Chrostoph Wolff, the distinguished Bach scholar, suggests that the B-minor Mass was assembled in order to preserve the summation of Bach's art in vocal music just as that other tantalizing, unfinished collection, The Art of the Fugue was compiled to demonstrate his unsurpassed ability in instrumental music.

All his life, Bach had assembled sets and cycles of music: a liturgical calendar of organ chorales, the preludes and fugues of The Well-Tempered Clavier in all the major and minor keys. In the last decade of his life, this fondness for unified sets became an obsession, inspiring the Goldberg Variations, the Musical Offering, and The Art of the Fugue. The B-minor Mass was Bach's final word on sacred choral music, the culmination of a career that had produced the great passions and dozens of cantatas.

The complete Mass in B minor was never performed during Bach's lifetime. With his death, in 1750, it easily slipped into oblivion, the temporary fate of virtually all of Bach's music. But even during the early nineteenth century, when his music came back to life—Bach was the first great composer to emerge from years of neglect—he was known primarily for The Well-Tempered Clavier, or the organ music; the great passions and the Mass in B minor were forgotten. We are told that Haydn, in his old age, acquired a copy of the Mass. Beethoven apparently sought out its pages when writing his own Missa solemnis. But the real reappraisal of Bach's music came two years after Beethoven's death, when Mendelssohn led the now-famous performance of the St. Matthew Passion in Berlin. A truncated version of the B-minor Mass followed there in 1835. It was only in 1859, in Leipzig, that the first complete performance was given. In due time—yet still more than a century after its completion—it was recognized as one of the immeasurable landmarks of sacred music.

It is easy to view the Mass as a kind of summing-up, for it represents an enormous diversity of material: the opening “Kyrie” is as elaborate a choral fugue as Bach ever wrote; the “Gratias”—and the final “Dona nobis pacem” which shares the same music—is an old-fashioned motet; the “confieteor” is strictly canonic, over a roving bass line; “Et incarnatus est” is free and boldly expressive; the subsequent “Crucifixus” inches forward over a relentless passacaglia; the “Credo” and “Confiteor” both use plain chant melodies.

The arias and duets, too, are richly diverse, each with important insturmental countermelodies. There is great care in the planning and shaping of the whole. Each of the Gloria's four solo movements calls forward a different obbligato instrument: the violin paired with the female voice in “Laudamus te”; the flute turning the “Domine Deus” duet into a trio; the oboe d'amore anticipating and imitating the “Qui sedes” singer; the horn playing against the bass solo lines in the “Quoniam.” The entire Credo is an architectural structure of perfect symmetry, with brilliant fugal choruses framing solo movements at either end and, at the heart, that remarkable and powerful sequence of choruses beginning with the solemn “Et incarnatus est” and the “Crucifixus,” in which so few notes convey so much grief, and then, from the depths of those final chords, ending with the explosion of “Et resurrexit.” It is a stroke of dramatic genius from the composer who never wrote opera.

Every generation has learned from the Mass in B minor, and this timeless and durable masterwork has survived the interpretative fashions of them all. Some of our questions may never be answered—How many singers should take each part? Is the unidentified solo instrument in the “Benedictus” a flute or, perhaps, a violin? And who is to say if we will ever accurately re-create the sounds, and the tempi, and the interpretative niceties, that Bach would have expected? Bach has left us but a few answers. But through our repeated efforts, both humble and presumptuous, to grapple with his questions, Bach's voice continues to shine.

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

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