Mozart's Coronation Mass, Program Notes

Mozart, Mass No. 15, Coronation
Brahms, Schicksalslied
Borodin, Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor

Mass No. 15 in C Major, K. 317, Coronation Mass (1779)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Born January 27, 1756 in Salzburg, Austria
Died December 5, 1791 in Vienna, Austria

Kyrie
Gloria
Credo
Sanctus
Benedictus
Agnus Dei

When twenty-four-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart returned home from Paris in January of 1779, he had little to show for his 16 months there aside from a sadder and wiser heart. Unwilling to play along with the intrigues and court politics that governed Parisian musical life, he received few composing commissions, and was often unable to collect his pay for the few pieces he did write. To add to his misery, his mother, who was staying with him in Paris, took ill in the summer of 1778 and died in his arms on July 3. Wolfgang had to arrange for her to be buried in Paris and wrote a painful letter to his father, Leopold, a few days later, breaking the news of his wife's death. Mozart now was unwilling to remain any longer in France, and his father agreed that it was time for him to depart. On his way home, he stopped in Mannheim, where he learned that Aloysia Webber, a young singer with whom he was hopelessly infatuated, had just been engaged to sing at the Opera in Munich and felt no further need for his company. It was a disappointed young man who returned to Salzburg that January to take the position as organist and concertmaster in the court of the Prince-Bishop that his father had secured for him. But his time away from home was not wasted. The fruits of his exposure to the wider musical world would soon become evident in a new-found mastery and sophistication in the music he created.

After the hectic bustle of Paris, the easy-going life in Salzburg soothed Mozart's wounded heart. He fell into the comfortable routines of family life: attending mass in the mornings, giving music lessons, going for walks, playing cards and socializing with friends. Although his situation seemed ideal, Mozart still wanted more. He wanted to be a brilliant composer of operas, not just a talented flunky at an obscure court playing the organ for an archbishop he considered to be an ignorant jerk. The theater was in his blood, and, as he had written to his father: "I have an inexpressible longing to write another opera...I have only to sit in a theater, hear the orchestra tuning their instruments, and I am quite beside myself all at once." So Mozart honed his craft by doing the next best thing: writing large liturgical works that were quasi-operatic in their brilliance and dramatic flair.

The first of these was a grand Mass completed on March 23, 1779. There is some dispute as to how it acquired its nickname " Coronation." Some scholars hold that it was probably intended to be performed at the ceremonial crowning of a statue of the Virgin in the Church of Maria-Plain just outside the city walls of Salzburg, others say it got the nickname when it was performed for the coronation of Leopold II in Prague in 1791. In any case, it was almost certainly premiered on Easter Sunday, April 4, 1779 in the Salzburg Cathedral. The work is scored for what was in those days a massive orchestra, including oboes, horns, trumpets, trombones, timpani and organ.

Mozart's employer, Archbishop Colloredo, was an "enlightened" prelate who insisted on following the strict rules for liturgical music laid down by the Habsburg Emperor Joseph II in Vienna. The idea was to keep the congregation's attention devotedly focused on the Mass itself and not distract them with gaudy musical theatrics. Of course Mozart the opera-lover hated this. He wrote to his Italian mentor and friend, Padre Martini:

"Our church music is very different from that of Italy, all the more so because a complete mass...even the most solemn ones, when the Prince-Archbishop himself presides, may not last more than three quarters of an hour. One needs particular training for this kind of composition; and furthermore it must be a mass with all instruments—trumpets, timpani, etc."

So Mozart's task was to write a Mass with soloists, chorus and large orchestra in a style grand and brilliant enough to fill Salzburg's huge cathedral with sonic splendor appropriate to the joyful mood of Easter Sunday—and do it all in less than forty-five minutes. He actually did it in less than thirty. His solution was the same strategy used later by Haydn and Beethoven: except for the Agnus Dei, he didn't give the vocal soloists individual arias, but treated them as an ensemble; he set the words economically without using counterpoint or fugal style, and he ended the Gloria and Credo with curt endings rather than lengthy fugues. The meltingly lovely melody sung by the solo soprano in the Agnus Dei was too gorgeous for Mozart to leave at church. In 1786 he changed the meter to 2/4 time and used it again in his opera The Marriage of Figaro as the aria "Dove Sono."

Schicksalslied, op. 54 (1868-71)
Johannes Brahms
Born May 7, 1833 in Hamburg, Germany
Died April 3, 1897 in Vienna, Austria

Brahms put his name on the musical map of Europe in bold print when he conducted the first performance of his German Requiem at the northern German city of Bremen on Good Friday, 1868. The performance, thoroughly rehearsed, delivered in an electric atmosphere in a packed cathedral, was an overwhelming success. The Requiem was repeated by popular demand the same month, and twenty-one performances throughout Europe the next year established Brahms as a musical master of international stature. It was undoubtedly this success that inspired Brahms to compose other ambitious works for chorus and orchestra, and he soon set to work on what is sometimes called his "Little Requiem," the Schicksalslied (Song of Destiny).

While visiting his friend Albert Dietrich at the seaport city of Wilhelmshaven in 1868, Brahms was introduced to a poem, Hyperions Schicksalslied, from a novel by the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843). Captivated by the poem, he disappeared while walking along the shore with his friend, who eventually found him sitting on the beach, busily jotting down ideas for a choral setting of the poem. The poem roughly divides into three verses. The first two verses describe the happy, everlasting serenity of the Immortals in the heavens. The third verse is a bitter comment on the misery and brevity of life for earthly mortals.

Brahms had no problem finding musical ideas for the blissful happiness described in the first two verses of the poem, but the gloomy resignation of the final verse troubled him. Brahms had a pronounced melancholic streak in his own personality, but the bleak conclusion of the poem was too dark, even for him. He felt he couldn't begin in the heavens only to leave the audience in the depths at the end. It took him three years to find the musical solution: the chorus sings the bitter complaint of the final verse to swirling, agitated rhythms and the orchestra begins a melancholy dirge that seems to be the culmination of the work. But Brahms then brings back the lovely, peaceful opening material and the music ends as serenely as it began. Brahms conducted the premiere performance in Karlsruhe on October 18, 1871, and the Schicksalslied has become a beloved part of the choral repertory.

Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor (1869-87)
Alexander Borodin
Born November 12, 1833 in St. Petersburg, Russia
Died February 27, 1887 in St. Petersburg, Russia

"Sasha" Borodin was the illegitimate son of a 52-year-old Georgian prince and a bewitching young Russian woman who discreetly gave birth to her child in an army barracks. Borodin's mother christened him with the surname of one of the prince's bonded servants and eventually married an army doctor named Kleinecke. Borodin grew up in the Kleinecke home as a gentle, delicate child whose love of music became evident early on. His mother included a piano teacher among the excellent private tutors she hired to educate her Sasha, but music was not on her list of career choices. Poorly educated herself, she wanted him to have a learned profession. Alexander eventually earned a doctorate in medicine at the St. Petersburg Academy of Medicine and Surgery and pursued a distinguished career in chemistry, making several significant advances in the study of aldehydes.

But all the while, Borodin never lost his love of making music. He began studying composition with Mily Balakirev in 1862, and by 1869 had completed one symphony and started work on another. Balakirev was the founding father of a group of nationalist Russian composers called "The Five" or "The Mighty Handful" which eventually included Borodin, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Modeste Mussorgsky and César Cui. Tired of imitating European composers, the group dedicated themselves to establishing a "New Russian School" which would produce music that was authentically Russian in style and flavor.

In 1869 Borodin read the epic Slavic prose poem The Lay of Igor's Host, which recounts the campaign of the Russian prince Igor Svyatoslavich against invading Polovtsian tribes in 1185. Eager to write something for the stage, he set aside work on his second symphony for a while to begin adapting the poem into an operatic libretto. Chemical research demanded the bulk of Borodin's time and energy (along with working in support of women's causes), and he wrote the music for Prince Igor piecemeal, in his spare time. The project continued, with many stops and starts, for eighteen years and was still incomplete when Borodin died in 1887.

One section that Borodin did finish, after a fashion, was the set of dances for the Polovtsians at the end of Act II. Rimsky-Korsakov, who helped him prepare the Polovtsian Dances for a concert performance in 1879, wrote in his memoirs: "It was high time to copy out the parts. In despair I heaped reproaches on Borodin. He, too, was none too happy. At last, giving up all hope, I offered to help him with the orchestration. Thereupon he came to my house in the evening, bringing with him the hardly touched score of the Polovtsian Dances; and the three of us—he, Anatoly Lyadov, and I—took it apart and began to score it in hot haste. To gain time, we wrote in pencil and not in ink. The finished sheets of the score Borodin covered with liquid gelatin, to keep our pencil marks intact; and in order to have the sheets dry the sooner, he hung them out like washing on lines in my study. Thus the number was ready and passed on to the copyist. The orchestration of the closing chorus I did almost single-handed..."

Today the Polovtsian Dances are the best known music from Prince Igor, which was finished after Borodin's death by Aleksander Glazunov and Rimsky-Korsakov and is rarely performed. They are often performed as a separate concert piece and the lilting, seductive melodies Borodin wrote for the dances have proven enduringly popular. So popular in fact, that they have shown up on Broadway (the 1953 musical Kismet), as pop songs (My Fantasy, Stranger in Paradise, Quiéreme), a hip-hop album (The Rhapsody), B-movie sound tracks (Fire Maidens from Outer Space), background music for several TV series (including The Simpsons) and even Playstation video games.

Program Notes Copyright © 2009 by Matthew Naughtin