Mass in C Major, Op.86
Beethoven (1770-1827)
By the spring of 1807, Beethoven could have prided himself on his situation.
The painful crisis in Heiligenstadt, caused by encroaching deafness, lay
five years in the past. His brave decision to return to Vienna and make a
career solely as a composer had been vindicated and now those five years
had seen the birth of masterly compositions like the Eroica symphony,
the violin concerto, and the opera Fidelio. Requests for new works were
beginning to flow in; Beethoven could simply set his price.
In the midst of this burgeoning activity there came a commission from
Prince Nicholas Esterházy II, whose family had been Haydn’s devoted
patrons for nearly thirty years. The prince wished to continue an annual
tradition of sponsoring a new mass for the name day of his deceased wife
Maria. For these occasions, Haydn himself had written six fine masses,
but this served only to make Beethoven wary of inevitable comparisons.
There was another daunting challenge since it would be the first completely
liturgical setting that Beethoven had ever attempted. He was no
churchgoer, but he certainly had his own religious views. It has been well
said that instead of believing in God and then Man, Beethoven believed in
Man and then God. In the same humanist vein, he described the intended
effect of this Mass from the standpoint of the ordinary listener as “heartfelt
acceptance, whence comes a deep sincerity of religious feeling”.
Not that there was much of that in the first performance on 13 September,
1807, when everything went wrong. Ill-disciplined singers had dodged
rehearsals, the orchestra was under-prepared; at the final run-through
only one of five altos was present. At the end, Prince Esterházy was
confounded not only by the poor performance but also by Beethoven’s
‘new’ approach to the text which made him exclaim “My dear Beethoven,
what have you gone and done now?!”
But the Mass is a rare jewel. Listen to the way the Kyrie begins its sense of
wonder and uplift as the choir sets out immediately from C major towards
the Romantic horizon of E major. Hear the different textures through
which Beethoven seamlessly combines soloists with chorus, and listen for
the moments when the clarinet leads the way into thrilling changes of key,
tempo and texture.
Although it is a discreet, almost humble work, the Mass has moments of
regal splendour, as in the Gloria where flutes, trumpets and timpani burst
in to make a joyful noise. The Credo is full of word-painting (downward
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