Overture Magazine - 2015-2016 Season May-June 2016 | Page 28

{ program notes
Grammy award for best chamber music/
small ensemble performance in 2014. 
A New York native, Mr. Burton earned
his bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College
Conservatory of Music, and a master’s
degree from Yale University.
Dashon Burton is making his BSO debut.

The Baltimore
Choral Arts Society
Tom Hall Music Director

For The Baltimore Choral Arts Society’s
bio., please see pg. 21.

About the concert:
Mass in B Minor, BWV 232

Johann Sebastian Bach

Born in Eisenach, Thuringia, March 21, 1685;
died in Leipzig, Saxony, July 28, 1750

Johann Sebastian Bach’s B Minor Mass
is generally ranked alongside Beethoven’s
Missa solemnis as one of the two greatest
settings of the Mass in musical history. But
the story of how it came into being is full
of mysteries, and Bach certainly did not
set out to compose it from beginning to
end in a single time period as Beethoven
did his. Instead, it became the magnificent
compilation of his life’s work as a composer,
a compendium of what he considered to be
his best music, refashioned and miraculously shaped into one monumental whole.
A large portion of the B Minor dates
back to a difficult period in Bach’s career in
1733, when his frequently unappreciative
employers on the Leipzig municipal council
seemed to be trying to push him out of his
post as the musical director of the city’s
St. Thomas Church. Realizing his precarious position, Bach approached the newly
appointed Elector of Saxony, Friedrich
August II, who reigned at the Saxon capital
of Dresden, seeking a possible appointment
there. The Dresden court was rich, cosmopolitan, and boasted a superb ensemble of
instrumentalists and singers, and its new
Elector was a Roman Catholic. So Bach
created the Kyrie and Gloria portions of the
Mass and sent them with an obsequious

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note to Friedrich August asking him to
accept “this trifling token of what science
I have achieved in music.”
The Kyrie and Gloria were no trifles,
but what Bach got in return was: a minor
appointment with a modest sum attached,
which was not even granted until 1736.
The Mass project then came to a halt for
more than a decade.
Today musicologists believe that the
creation of a complete Mass setting waited
until the last years of Bach’s life, probably
between August 1748 and October 1749.
The newly composed portions of the B
minor were probably the last compositions
Bach ever wrote, for he was now in poor
health and going blind.
The B Minor Mass was almost certainly
never performed in its entirety during
Bach’s lifetime, for its vast dimensions
could never fit into the confines of a church
service. Instead, it was a work for the future
— for the concert halls that did not yet
exist. In fact, it had to wait more than a
century for its first full performance, which
took place in Leipzig in 1859.

Bach roots its opening
chorus in ancient tradition
with the tenors intoning the
Gregorian chant associated
with the Credo.
The B minor’s Music

Composers of the Baroque period did
not consider it plagiarism to borrow from
either another composer’s works or their
own earlier ones to craft a new work; it was
standard practice and almost considered a
compliment to the original. And so Bach
based many of the B minor’s numbers on
works he’d written before, both sacred
and secular, and generally in the German
language. But he chose with unerring skill
what would suit a specific text and mood of
the Mass and revised the original extensively for its new setting. He freely mixed
in styles derived from secular genres such
as opera, dance, concerto and the secular
cantata into this sacred music. The solo
portions of the B Minor were especially
based on secular sources.

The B Minor Mass is the apotheosis of
Baroque contrapuntal art: the interweaving of many independent melodic lines.
This contrapuntal writing involved
both a brilliant, well-stocked orchestra
and a chorus divided into four, or more
usually, five parts. Bach created extraordinary counterpoint for them, often in
fugues b