SACRED MUSIC Winter 2009 Volume 136, Number 4 EDITORIAL Viennese Classical Masses? | William Mahrt 3 ARTICLES Between Tradition and Innovation: Sacred Intersections and the Symphonic Impulse in Haydn’s Late Masses | Eftychia Papanikolaou 6 “Requiem per me”: Antonio Salieri’s Plans for His Funeral | Jane Schatkin Hettrick 17 Haydn’s “Nelson” Mass in Recorded Performance: Text and Context | Nancy November 26 Sunday Vespers in the Parish Church | Fr. Eric M. Andersen 33 REPERTORY The Masses of William Byrd | William Mahrt 42 COMMENTARY Seeking the Living: Why Composers Have a Responsibility to be Accessible to the World | Mark Nowakowski 49 The Role of Beauty in the Liturgy | Fr. Franklyn M. McAfee, D.D. 51 Singing in Unison? Selling Chant to the Reluctant Choir | Mary Jane Ballou 54 ARCHIVE The Lost Collection of Chant Cylinders | Fr. Jerome F. Weber 57 The Ageless Story | Jennifer Gregory Miller 62 REVIEWS A Gift to Priests | Rosalind Mohnsen 66 A Collection of Wisdom and Delight | William Tortolano 68 The Fire Burned Hot | Jeffrey Tucker 70 NEWS The Chant Pilgrimage: A Report 74 THE LAST WORD Musical Instruments and the Mass | Kurt Poterack 76 POSTSCRIPT Gregorian Chant: Invention or Restoration? | William Mahrt SACRED MUSIC Formed as a continuation of Caecilia, published by the Society of St. Caecilia since 1874, and The Catholic Choirmaster, published by the Society of St. Gre- gory of America since 1915. Published quarterly by the Church Music Associ- ation of America. Office of Publication: 12421 New Point Drive, Harbour Cove, Richmond, VA 23233. E-mail: [email protected]; Website: www.musicasacra.com Editor: William Mahrt Managing Editor: Jeffrey Tucker Editor-at-Large: Kurt Poterack Editorial Assistance: Janet Gorbitz and David Sullivan. 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Postmaster: Send address changes to SACRED MUSIC, 12421 New Point Drive, Harbour Cove, Richmond, VA 23233. EDITORIAL Viennese Classical Masses? by William Mahrt he present issue includes several articles touching upon the sacred music of Viennese classicism. This provides an opportunity to reflect upon questions that arise concerning that repertory. These have been persistent questions, Tasked in their own time, in succeeding generations, and even in the present. The fundamental question is one that pertains to the church music of our own time as well: to what extent can the music of the church adopt the idioms and procedures of the surrounding secular musical world? We read complaints from the eighteenth century that the church music had become too operatic, that it did not respect the conventional distinctions between music of the church, chamber, and theater. Yet masses of Haydn and Mozart particularly, but also of other com- posers—Schubert, Michael Haydn, Weber, and even Beethoven—have had a stable place in the repertories of certain large city churches, particularly in Europe, but also in the United States; so it will be useful to consider the issues surrounding these works to come to an understanding of their use in the sacred liturgy. The focus should be upon the normative works, not the curious exceptions. For example, there are certain masses of the type missa brevis in which the texts of the longer movements, par- ticularly the Credo, are “telescoped,” the text is divided among the four voice parts, which then sing four successive lines of text simultaneously, resulting in a very brief setting of the complete text, but one for which it is difficult for any listener to discern just what is being sung. At the opposite extreme are extended compositions with ample space for the development of each movement; perhaps the most obvious example is the Missa solemnis of Beethoven, a work whose music alone totals a duration of well over an hour. (Recordings show durations of about seventy- two minutes; contrast this with nineteen minutes for Mozart’s Missa brevis, K. 275, or his Missa longa, K. 262 at twenty-seven minutes.) The liturgy which included such a work would be quite long, but more important, the music would most likely dwarf the other parts of the liturgy. Whether such works are remotely conceivable for liturgical use is not the point here; rather the question is, are the standard works often sung for the sacred liturgy appropriate for this use? To take a contrasting example: my choir frequently sings masses of Orlando di Lasso; these are mainly parody masses—masses based upon the polyphonic materials of a pre-existing piece, a motet or a chanson. I usually choose a mass based upon a motet, since the borrowed material is more securely sacred. Some of Lasso’s masses use a borrowed chanson so transparently as to raise the question of whether their sacred character is compromised by it. Yet, others show strik- ing differences from the secular piece. For example, Lasso’s Missa Il me suffit: the chanson is a simple piece, very homophonic with considerable repetition. The mass uses the tune of the chan- son, but incorporates it into a relatively complex contrapuntal texture. For anyone who knows the chanson, the difference between the secular and sacred versions is quite clear; the elements of the secular have been transformed into a sacred work, have been set aside to sacred purposes 1 and distinguished from the secular by a remarkable change in musical style. William Mahrt is editor of Sacred Music and president of the CMAA. [email protected] 1A similar transformation of this tune happened in the realm of the Protestant chorale, for Il me suffit became Was mein Gott will, das g’scheh allzeit, a chorale used in numerous works of J. S Bach and others. 3 Sacred Music Volume 136, Number 4 Winter 2009 The questions are similar for the Viennese classical masses: are there distinguishing features that set off the style of orchestrally accompanied solo, vocal, and choral music sufficiently to maintain the sacred character needed for use in the liturgy? First, a fundamental issue should be cleared up. These works are often called “concert Masses,” placing them in a category of works such as the War Requiem of Benjamin Britten or the Mass of Leonard Bernstein, implying that they were composed for performance in a concert rather than in a Mass. Nothing could be farther from the truth; they were composed for and regularly performed for the liturgy. The confusion may come from a misreading of the term style concertato, from the early seventeenth century. It pertains to sacred music, performed in the liturgy, and it means that there are independent instrumental parts playing together with vocal and choral parts; it was distinguished from a style desig- nated by da cappella, meaning that instruments doubled the choral parts. Clearly, then, the masses of Mozart and Haydn were in a “concerted By the eighteenth century, Latin was style,” but intended for liturgical per- received as a sacred language. formance. To avoid this confusion, it is probably better simply to refer to them as “orchestra Masses.” For the orchestra masses of the Viennese classical composers, what, then, are the hallmarks of the sacred that distinguish their style from that of operatic or symphonic music in general? I would identify four. 1) The text of the Latin ordinary. By the eighteenth century, Latin was certainly received as a sacred language; its principal usage was liturgical, though it retained some academic currency as well. Moreover, the texts of the orchestral masses were (with the exception of Requiem masses) always the same; congregations could be expected to grasp these texts in performance. Today, the use of Latin is even more exclusively liturgical. Curiously though, the average con- gregation of today has a better chance of comprehending the text of the Latin ordinary than con- gregations before the council could. Since most of the congregation has had ample opportunity to say and sing the texts in the vernacular, this familiarity is an aid to their comprehension of the same texts in Latin. In the case of my own congregation, which sings the Latin ordinary in Gre- gorian chant on normal Sundays, while the choir sings a polyphonic ordinary on major feast days, the congregation has an intimate familiarity with the Latin text through having sung it and are ready to hear a beautiful setting of it sung by others.