Juilliard415 Royal Conservatoire the Hague Baroque Orchestra and Choir
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Saturday Evening, November 19, 2016, at 7:30 The Juilliard School presents Juilliard415 and Royal Conservatoire The Hague Baroque Orchestra and Choir Ton Koopman , Conductor Aldona Bartnik , Soprano Kara Dugan , Mezzo-soprano Aleksan Chobanov , Alto Joshua Blue , Tenor Tigran Matinyan , Tenor Dominik Belavy , Bass Berend Eijkhout , Bass JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685 –1750) Mass in B minor, BWV 232 I. Missa II. Credo (Symbolum Nicenum) III. Sanctus IV. Osanna, Benedictus, Agnus Dei Performance time: approximately 2 hours and 15 minutes, including one 15-minute intermission. Juilliard’s full-scholarship Historical Performance program was established and endowed in 2009 by the generous support of Bruce and Suzie Kovner. The Royal Conservatoire The Hague would like to thank its patrons and sponsors, the municipality of The Hague, Netherland –America Foundation, Embassy of the United States The Hague, and the Netherlands Consulate General in New York. The taking of photographs and the use of recording equipment are not permitted in this auditorium. Information regarding gifts to the school may be obtained from the Juilliard School Development Office, 60 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023-6588; (212) 799-5000, ext. 278 (juilliard.edu/giving). Alice Tully Hall Please make certain that all electronic devices are turned off during the performance. Note on the Program opportunity to present the new elector of Saxony, Friedrich August II, with a petition by Robert Mealy to be appointed court composer. Accom - panying this petition was what he describes Mass in B minor as a “trifling product of that science which JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH I have attained in musique .” This was the Born March 21, 1685, in Eisenach, Kyrie and Gloria of what was eventually to Thuringia, Germany become the Mass in B minor. Died July 28, 1750, in Leipzig, Germany Lutheran services, particularly in a univer - The Mass in B minor by now has taken on sity town like Leipzig, would certainly have the massive stature of a large, free-standing involved Latin as much as German, and work of art like an enormous sacred sculp - there was plenty of liturgical reason for cre - ture. Bach himself would be very surprised ating a Latin setting of these two parts of the to find his Mass heard in a concert hall, as Mass. In fact, Bach created several other an uninterrupted performance. After all, Latin Masses around the same time, two of any setting of the Ordinary of the Mass which were the subject of Juilliard415’s col - was intended for a context of hymns, laboration with the Yale Schola last season prayers, an extended sermon, and read - with Masaaki Suzuki. But clearly this par - ings from the Bible. It was only with the ticular setting was very special to Bach, publication of what was described as the not only as a display of his mastery of the “Hohe Messe” in the 1840s that (follow - great arts of counterpoint, but also as a sig - ing the fashion of grand mass perfor - nal that he could accommodate the more mances inaugurated with Beethoven’s modern tastes of the Dresden court. Missa solemnis ) Bach’s Mass in B minor began to be heard as a performance piece The breadth and gravity of the work are in itself. announced with the very opening of the first Kyrie, in a massive threefold invoca - The 1733 Missa tion. What follows is the working out of a In fact, there are several B-minor Masses, great fugue in two large-scale expositions, depending on when you look. The first part each with an instrumental introduction. Most of this work, the setting of the Kyrie and unusually, all the thematic and motivic mate - Gloria , was assembled in 1733, at a time rial for this fugue is introduced at the very when Bach was becoming deeply frus - beginning, during a 24-bar orchestral ritor - trated by his working conditions in Leipzig. nello. Once the fugue has worked itself out In 1730 he wrote a memorandum to the twice through all the choral entries, in town council, explaining the bare minimum Tovey’s words, “it reaches its last note number of musicians he required to exe - with an astronomical punctuality.” cute his duties. One of the few surviving bits of his correspondence from this time The second Kyrie is an equally dense but is a letter to his old friend Georg Erdmann , far more straightforward exercise in the complaining bitterly about his job at the stile antico traditions of strict counterpoint, Thomaskirche and asking about any possi - a style that Bach was more and more inter - ble job openings. ested in during the 1730s and 1740s. By con - trast, the invocation to the human figure of By 1733, when his oldest son Wilhelm Christ, Christe eleison, is set as an operatic Friedemann became organist at the duet. (It is tempting to read a certain Sophienkirche in Dresden, Bach took the amount of symbolism into his use of two voices as the depiction of the second The remaining clauses of the Gloria are set member of the Trinity.) in a variety of ways. The Laudamus te becomes an opportunity for exceptional The movements of the Gloria , like most of virtuosity on the part of both the violin the Mass, were probably all adapted from soloist (whose part rises to the highest earlier works. Bach’s reuse of cantata note Bach ever writes for the instrument, a materials increases during this period, as high A) and the soprano. Was this perhaps he became increasingly preoccupied with intended as a tribute for the celebrated consolidating his work and as a way of cre - soprano Faustina Bordoni, who was in res - ating a context for this music that would idence at Dresden with her husband, the be more long-lasting than the original can - opera composer Hasse? tata. A Latin Mass could be reused on var - ious occasions, but a cantata’s text is The Gratias is another stile antico fugue, highly specific to a particular Sunday, and and one of the few movements where an would rarely be revived. earlier version definitely survives. This is based on the opening of Cantata 29, Wir Only a few earlier models survive for the danken dir, Gott, which was written for the movements of Bach’s Mass in B minor, but election of the Leipzig town council in judging by various details of the autograph 1731, and probably reused several times (writing the wrong clef or key at the begin - for other city council elections. ning of a line, for example) it seems clear that Bach was generally adapting music At the heart of the Gloria comes another that already existed. The fact that we don’t movement that seems to be aimed at a have specific models for many of these specifically Dresden musical taste, the duet movements is not so surprising. We have Domine Deus. In Bach’s carefully prepared a great deal of Bach’s sacred music, but by set of parts presented to Augustus, the flute no means all. And we have very little of the solo is notated in a lombard rhythm, the large-scale secular works he wrote to cele - sighing short-long figure that was so charac - brate various name-days and birthdays of teristic of Hasse’s galant style. The muted Saxon nobility. These works in particular strings are also a marker of this “modern” would likely have involved festive D-major style. Within this delicate texture, dominated choruses in triple-time, and are believed to by a single recurring motif, the singers be the source of many of these celebratory declaim two texts at the same time, one movements in the Mass. about God the Father and one about God the Son, an elegant musical way of indicating A good example of this is the opening cho - they are two aspects of the same divinity. rus of the Gloria, which may have been taken from a secular cantata, or might per - The Qui tollis is another adaptation, this time haps have originated as an instrumental from Cantata 46 written in 1723, where the concerto (since Bach’s alterations in the original text was one familiar to us from manuscript are mostly in the vocal parts). Handel’s Messiah : “Behold and see, if The following Et in terra pax also seems to there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow.” be an adaptation: among the new features The transformation of this from D minor to are the radiant trumpet lines toward the B minor, and the reworking to fit the new end, which are the subject of much cor - text, required a good deal of labor from Bach, rection and reworking in the manuscript. with many corrections in the autograph. After the Qui sedes, set for alto and oboe Bach’s autograph score labels each section d’amore solo, we hear one of the most of the missa tota as a separate part: after unusual instrumental textures of the Mass. the 1733 Kyrie and Gloria (labeled Section In the Quoniam the idea of God alone 1) , there comes “2. Symbolum Nicenum ” being the “most high” is illustrated by an (Bach’s term for the Credo), “3. Sanctus ,” instrumental setting of subterranean instru - and finally “4. Osanna - Benedictus, Agnus ments . Corrections in the manuscript sug - Dei, et Dona nobis pacem .” gest that this was originally a work for two oboes and trumpet. Bach transforms this Even more than the Gloria, the Symbolum into a dark texture of two bassoons and Nicenum is arranged symmetrically, with the continuo, accompanying a spectacular horn Crucifixus at its center. The Symbolum opens obbligato perhaps intended for the great with one of the few movements that seem to Dresden player Johann Adam Schindler.