Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) never gave the title Mass in B Minor to the work you are hearing today. Shortly before his death he collected together in four separate folios all the movements of a traditional Roman Catholic Mass. They were labeled: 1. Missa (settings in multiple movements of the complete texts of the Kyrie and Gloria), 2. Symbolum Nicenum (Bach’s term for the Roman Credo), and 3. Sanctus. The fourth folio was titled Osanna, Benedictus, Agnus Dei, et Dona nobis pacem. It was not unusual in Lutheran practice of Bach’s time for the eucharistic to begin with a Missa (as in a Catholic Mass, sung sequentially and in Latin). Bach himself composed four other Missae for practical use in Leipzig although none of them come close to the scale of the Missa in the B Minor Mass.

Since there is no known opportunity Bach or his contemporary Lutheran church musicians would have had to perform all the movements of a Roman Mass in a liturgical context, speculation exists as to what prompted him to take up this challenge so late in his career. The scale is so dauntingly huge that the likelihood of its actually being performed in a liturgical setting was as unlikely of realization then as it is now. There is general agreement now that the impetus was the same as that which led him to compose The Art of Fugue, a close predecessor to the B Minor Mass, The Musical Offering, and the Canonic Variations on Vom Himmel hoch, also among the late works. Since Bach’s style throughout his life had been to use and re-use, to expand and develop the forms and compositional techniques that pre-existed his time, it is natural to suggest that in his late life he would attempt to summarize and bring to some sort of final perfection—matters of practicality of execution or performance potential aside—all that he had absorbed in a lifetime of experimentation with the tools of his art. Michael Steinberg says of these massively complex and very challenging works, “This late music is of an astonishing adventurousness and reminds us that Bach is one of those glorious old-age radicals of the stamp of Haydn, Beethoven, Verdi, Schönberg, Stravinsky, and Carter.”

Almost all of the movements of the Mass in B Minor are adaptations of movements from earlier works—those adaptations range from simple changes of text underlay to quite elaborate re-workings such as the dropping or adding of instrumental ritornellos, excisions in whole or in part of structural elements, adding or subtracting instruments from the orchestration. The tragic mood of the Crucifixus movement is substantially re-worked from its first version in Cantata BWV 12 (Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen), one of the earliest of Bach’s borrowings from himself in the Mass in B Minor. The half-notes of the chaconne bass in the cantata now become quarter-notes carrying a far more ominous sense of footsteps, as if to Golgotha? The addition of flutes playing simple sighing half-notes is a miraculous inspiration over the simpler but still quite eloquent orchestration in the early cantata.

How did the whole of this magnificent work come together?

There is general agreement now that Bach set himself the task of creating this great summarizing work during a fourteen-month period beginning in mid-1748 and ending in October 1749. Failing eyesight after that point confirms that as a completion date. The work seems to have been built on the cornerstone of a large-scale Missa that he wrote for submission to the Elector at Dresden in1733 in hopes of obtaining an official court position (which did not come through). Scoring and scale for the whole Mass in B Minor seem to have been determined by the decision to re-use this 1733 work even though parts of it had already been recycled to other purposes.

Since Bach’s custom was to begin at the beginning of large compositions, it is likely that after making a few very minor adjustments to the scoring of the Gloria he set to work next on the Credo. The scale of requirements that had already been established there—five voices, three trumpets and timpani, two oboes, two flutes, strings, and continuo—governed his approach here. Calling mostly on earlier works, he adapted them to different texts, expanded and contracted as necessary to create the splendidly logical structure of this crucial nine-movement core. There is now general agreement as to which sections of the Credo were entirely new compositions. The Confiteor is one. It begins in the style of an accompanied Renaissance madrigal, turning midway into a chorale prelude of sorts into which a plainsong melody in expanded note values is integrated. In its text, believers “acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins,” which is followed by the Et expecto in which they find empowerment to “look for the resurrection of the dead.” The Confiteor doesn’t end really, it just stops. The words of hope (Et expecto) are not immediately proclaimed with exuberance but in tones of hushed  . . . is it awe? uncertainty? both? Through twenty-five adagio bars of what Steinberg calls “the strangest harmonic progressions [Bach] ever invented,” the listener is led magically, bewilderingly, transcendentally through distant tonal centers in deepening wonder. The composer in his final year and his final work seems to be saying, “Can one really dare to believe this?” But then all doubt is resolved with the arrival of glorious D major. Trumpets and drums join in the exhilarating confirmation of Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum.

The Sanctus is, like the Missa, one of the larger stand-alone, previously composed movements that Bach incorporated into the Mass in B Minor virtually intact. It dates from 1724, intended for use that year, and in a couple of subsequent years, at Christmas services in Leipzig.

The concluding movements of the Mass derive from various sources. The Agnus Dei which was adapted from an aria in the Ascension Oratorio (1735) is radically revised although the basic scoring for alto and strings is the same. For the final movement, the Dona nobis pacem, Bach uses the same music as the Gratias chorus in the Gloria. My thanks to Michael Steinberg for citing the Bach specialist Arthur Mendel concerning this particular example of recycling “ . . . there is one thing that Bach surely saw at this point when it came to concluding this masterpiece, at once so miscellaneous and so integral: setting “Gratias agimus tibi” and “Dona nobis pacem” to the same music, he reminds us that the prayer and the thanks are one.”

Some thoughts on “Authenticity” and the Mass in B Minor

In 1885, on the two-hundredth anniversary of Bach’s birth, the London Bach Choir gave a gala performance of the Mass in B Minor in the Albert Hall (they had given the first complete English reading of the work only as recently as 1876). Otto Goldschmidt conducted, and the chorus numbered over five hundred. Aside from the absurdly large number of singers involved (absurd to us, but really rather modest by nineteenth-century oratorio performance standards), the performance is of interest for two reasons. First, the conductor broke with contemporary custom by attempting to restore certain elements of eighteenth-century performance practice; and, second, the performance was reviewed by George Bernard Shaw, whose astute comments are still relevant in many particulars. Here is some of what he wrote for The Dramatic Review of 28 March 1885.

While ruing “the jog trot which seems to be Mr. Goldschmidt’s prestissimo,” Shaw nevertheless acknowledges that “he is capable, on occasion, of a flash of that spirit which earned for Bach himself the compliment that ‘in conducting he was very accurate; and in time, which he generally took at a very lively pace, he was always sure’” (emphasis added by GBS).

Orchestral instruments that have fallen into disuse since Bach’s time were specially manufactured and studied by eminent players for the occasion. . . . The renovation of the obsolete oboe d’amore (love-hautboy), and the execution of the trumpet parts upon the instrument for which they were written, instead of, as usual, upon the clarionet, proved very successful, and furnished a fresh illustration of the fact that our modern ‘orchestration’ falls as far short of Bach’s orchestral music as the medley of dance-tunes and stage thunder which constitutes a Parisian grand opera falls short of one of his cantatas.

For those who are inclined to believe that all wisdom concerning the performance of pre-nineteenth-century music is of recent vintage, Shaw’s comments are sobering. For although it is true that in the past fifty years great advances have been made in the study of eighteenth-century performance practice, it is also true that even in generations preceding our own there were some few who questioned the conventional wisdom and agitated for reform.

The widespread interest today in period-sensitive performances of the music of Bach and Handel and their predecessors (and their successors, too, for that matter) is surely healthy; but it is also problematical to the extent that it encourages the false assumption that any performance can be in any real sense authentic. In no previous generation have scholars and performers joined together in such numbers to investigate what Bach, and others, meant by what they wrote down, and what was meant by what was left unwritten. That quest has led to the humbling awareness that in some important matters no modern solution will suffice completely.  Some things remain a mystery just because we weren’t there! We can play Bach on instruments that closely approximate those of his time. We can articulate vocal and instrumental lines in ways that seem to be consistent with what we learn from contemporary commentary or through contextual assumptions. We can make instrumental decisions, such as when the bassoon should be added or when the number of strings adjusted—matters often left unspecified in the score—based on what we know of contemporary convention. But can a modern musician ever fully erase the sound of Wagner or Brahms or Stravinsky from one’s ears—one’s ear memory, as it were? To what extent should one try? No matter how honest the intent, can a modern performance of the Mass in B Minor in a concert hall—or even in a church, but separated from a liturgical context—aspire to true authenticity when no complete performance under the composer’s supervision in any context is known to have been given?

It has been suggested that the Mass, with its many re-workings of previously composed movements, represents both Bach’s summing up of his own life’s work in the Church and his personal homage to that ancient body of masterpieces composed for use in the Roman liturgy. If it is an idealized Mass, as opposed to one truly intended for liturgical use—the close proximity of its composition to that of The Art of Fugue (i.e., near the end of his life) would suggest as much—then the problems of performance realization are complicated even further.

In the 107 years since Boston Cecilia gave the first complete Boston performance of the Mass in B Minor, performers and audiences here have had many opportunities to experience the sublime riches of this incomparable masterpiece. All of those performances were more or less flawed, as this one will be. All involved compromises of one sort or another, as does this one. All were valid and special, in spite of their flaws, because Bach’s supreme genius speaks through and to a flawed humanity with a voice that is ageless and inextinguishable.