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Johann Sebastian Bach 1685–1750 Mass in B minor BWV232 Compact Disc 1
55’48
4 5 6 7 8 9
IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX.
Chorus (a 5) & Soloists: Et incarnatus est Chorus: Crucifixus etiam pro nobis (a 4) Chorus (a 5) & Soloists: Et resurrexit tertia die Aria (Bass): Et in Spiritum Sanctum Chorus: Confiteor unum baptisma etiarn pro nobis (a 5) Chorus: Et expecto resurrectionem (a 5)
2’36 3’17 3’51 4’56 5’04 2’04
I. MISSA
1 2 3
KYRIE I. Chorus: Kyrie eleison (a 5) II. Duet (Soprano I & II): Christe eleison III. Chorus: Kyrie eleison (a 4)
4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
GLORIA IV. Chorus: Gloria in excelsis Deo (a 5) V. Chorus: Et in terra pax hominibus (a 5) VI. Aria (Soprano II): Laudamus te VII. Chorus: Gratias agimus tibi (a 4) VIII. Duet (Soprano I & Tenor): Domine Deus IX. Chorus (a 4) & Soloists: Qui tollis peccata mundi X. Aria (Alto): Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris XI. Aria (Bass II): Quoniam tu solus Sanctus XII. Chorus: Cum Sancto Spiritu (a 5)
Compact Disc 2
1 2 3
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II. SYMBOLUM NICENUM (CREDO) I. Chorus: Credo in unum Deum (a 5) II. Chorus: Patrem omnipotentem (a 4) III. Duet (Soprano I & Alto): Et in unum Dominum
III. SANCTUS 10 Chorus: Sanctus (a 6) 10’10 5’21 4’16
1’48 6’41 4’17 2’32 5’28 2’30 4’14 4’37 3’48
54’21
11 12 13 14 15
IV. OSANNA – BENEDICTUS – OSANNA – AGNUS DEI – DONA NOBIS PACEM I. Chorus: Osanna in excelsis (a 8) II. Aria (Tenor): Benedictus III. Chorus: Osanna in excelsis (a 8) IV. Aria (Soprano II): Agnus Dei V. Chorus: Dona nobis pacem (a 4)
5’17
2’34 4’16 2’33 4’58 3’05
Hillevi Martinpelto soprano I Bernarda Fink soprano II Axel Köhler alto Christoph Prégardien tenor Matthias Goerne bass I Franz-Josef Selig bass II RIAS Kammerchor chorus master Marcus Creed Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin René Jacobs
2’41 2’01 4’58
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Johann Sebastian Bach: Mass in B minor BWV232 In 1818, well before Bach’s great Mass in B minor (also known as ‘High Mass’ from 1845) was given its first complete performance, the Swiss music historian and publisher Hans Georg Nägeli described it prophetically as the ‘greatest musical masterpiece of all times and nations’. When the composer began writing in 1748, his hand showing signs of advancing illness, he knew that he would not be able to introduce the work to the public himself. The Mass in B minor, intended as his bequest to posterity, marks the consummation of the ecclesiastical style, which it sums up and epitomises in exemplary fashion. Musically speaking, it was Bach’s final message to his contemporaries. The enormous length of the Mass (around two hours’ duration) was clearly beyond the requirements of divine service in Leipzig and, indeed, any liturgical purpose. Even though the Mass in B minor represents Bach’s legacy in the realm of church music, it paradoxically calls for a concert setting to come fully into its own. The Sing-Akademie, a Berlin choral association, and its then director, Carl Friedrich Rungenhagen, deserve credit for staging what was probably the first complete performance of the work in Berlin on 20 February 1834. When Bach completed the Mass in B minor in 1748–9, he mainly rearranged and assembled older material rather than composing new music. The principal source was the Missa (Kyrie and Gloria), which he had sent to Dresden in 1733 with a dedication to the Elector of Saxony Frederick Augustus II (who also ruled Poland for a while as Augustus III) as an application for the post of court composer. By adding the Credo, the Sanctus/Benedictus and the Agnus Dei, which chiefly derive from older material he had reworded and rearranged, Bach turned the ‘Missa’ into a ‘Missa tota’: the full setting of the Ordinary of the Mass. In fact, he had already performed the Sanctus chorus in Leipzig in 1724 and 1727, and the material used for the Crucifixus was borrowed from a cantata of the Weimar period (Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen BWV12, dating from c.1714). 4
There is no evidence whatsoever that major parts of the work, including the Kyrie and Gloria completed in 1733, were performed during Bach’s lifetime. Nor do the sheets of music that the composer sent to Dresden in 1733 reveal any signs of actual use. Apparently, the court had little need for Bach’s talents, and so the master had to make repeated bids, accompanied by musical tributes complete with drums and trumpets, before he was finally granted the coveted title of composer to the Saxon and Polish court in 1736. The score of the B minor Mass shows marks of incongruity where heterogeneous sources were joined together. The choral parts vary in number (four-, five- and six-part chorus, eight-part double chorus in the Osanna – such a regrouping of forces is hardly possible in a narrow church gallery), different woodwind combinations appear in the tutti movements (three oboes in the Sanctus as opposed to the usual complement of two transverse flutes and two oboes), and some of the rewording is rather awkward (e.g. ‘Osann’ in excelsis’). These circumstances and disparities in the reallocation of the words from what were originally da capo arias and choruses tend to suggest that the music was previously used for some other purpose. But the cyclic pattern which this material is made to fit has been so carefully contrived that it lends the overall work a compelling sense of unity, despite the different origins of its constituent parts. Bach selected the material to be reused on the basis of whether it was suitable for integration into the cyclic whole, into the theological and musical message he wished to convey, and whether it would lend itself to a new text. In marked contrast to a number of previous occasions (as in the case of several arias in the Christmas Oratorio), he was very careful in choosing this material, often subjecting it to extensive changes with its new purpose in mind. (While working on the Mass, Bach sought to achieve a better balance by reallocating parts of the text to arias and choruses.) The different sources employed are hardly discernible in the overall context.
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The wealth of musical resources makes Bach’s High Mass a veritable compendium of the ecclesiastical style which was already on the way out at the time Bach was putting the finishing touches to his masterpiece. The reasons for the trend were institutional (the decline of Latin schools and the educational reforms in the wake of the Enlightenment deprived Protestant figural church music of its material basis) and stylistic (the next generation of composers, induding Bach’s most gifted sons, found polyphony and counterpoint too constraining for their own expressive needs). In writing his Mass in B minor, Bach not only sought to demonstrate his supreme musicianship, but drew on all the resources at his command to convey a spiritual message to the listener. In the Kyrie, he explores three different forms of musical expression in an impassioned entreaty for God’s mercy. He brings in trumpets and drums to sing the praises of the Lord in the Gloria, Credo and Sanctus. As so often before, one of his most exquisite and poignant musical phrases serves to express the idea of peace (‘et in terra pax’). In the Credo, Bach assigns the text of the old Christian Symbolum Nicenum (the Nicene Creed) to choral pieces and arias varying in origin and age, but manages to link them together in an elaborate symmetrical edifice. The three middle choruses (flanked by an outer framework consisting of choruses and arias) proclaim the belief in the Incarnation (Et incarnatus est), Crucifixion (Crucifixus etiam pro nobis) and Resurrection (Et resurrexit tertia die) of Christ as the centrepiece of the Christian faith, with the lament of the Crucifixus chorus marking the focal point from which everything flows: Christ who was crucified and buried for us. It is hardly amazing that Bach should have chosen the Ordinary of the Mass as the basis for his immortal monument to church music. Shared by all major branches of Christianity, the venerable text is the most universal formulation of the Christian creed – as opposed to the de tempore character of Passions and cantatas relating to a specific feast day with the appropriate readings from the Bible. The words ‘Jesu Juva’ (‘Help me, Jesus’) and ‘Soli Deo Gloria’ (‘Glory to God alone’), which Bach stated
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at the beginning and the end of his cantata scores, become the central message of the High Mass, expressed in music of surpassing beauty. A hymn of praise to God on high, An exhortation to my fellow men. This dictum, which graces the title page of the Orgelbüchlein, reflects the ultimate purpose to which Bach devoted his Mass in B minor. Dietmar Hiller Translation: Bernd Zöllner
Recording: September 1992, Jesus-Christus-Kirche, Berlin-Dahlem, Germany Recording producer: Bernd Runge Balance engineer: Eberhard Hinz Recording engineer: Horst-Dieter Käppler 1993 Edel Records GmbH 2015 Brilliant Classics Licensed from Edel Germany GmbH
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