Mozart’s Mass in C minor at the Salzburg Festival – Culture
It’s not really overwhelming music, and yet one always feels emotionally overwhelmed. Because Mozart’s C minor Mass, no matter how much its composition may be based on Baroque models and Italian opera, has its own style of mediation, of stepping over. Above all, there are two parameters that stand for it: the artistically embellished solo vocals and the fugue-like piling up of the chormonuments. Both require great precision and coordination, especially with the accompanying instrumental ensemble, and the early music specialist Philippe Herreweghe stands for this kind of subtle balance like no other conductor. What is also pleasantly noticeable: he can manage with forti and fortissimi. The choir – the Collegium Vocale Gent – is not always on the gas pedal, preferring to take a step back in terms of sound and clarity. Which doesn’t help much when the orchestra of the Camerata Salzburg is playing at full capacity. Herreweghe has to push that back every now and then, and then you suddenly hear the outstanding choir in all its splendor and subtle tonal variety, precisely told in the piano and yet lively, powerful and yet never roaring. The field opened up at the beginning of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s C minor chorale “Mitten wir im Leben sind” and continued in the opening of the half-hour Gloria, which begins like a large choral symphony. But in the following verses, the hour of the soloists comes, the mild coloratura soprano Morgane Heyse, the powerful-voiced mezzo-soprano Eva Zaicik and the lyric tenor David Fischer. Here, too, it is convincing how precisely the solos and choir are coordinated not only in terms of dynamics, but also in terms of musical gesture.
The musicologist Robins Landon completed Mozart’s work
Mozart’s employer at the time, Archbishop Colloredo, had decreed that the mass compositions should no longer be as long as Mozart practiced in his C minor Mass. Was Mozart struggling with this and inhibited himself from completing the gigantic work? Because after the Benedictus it breaks off and one does not know what was sung afterwards in St. Peter’s. Parts from other Masses by Mozart? The musicologist Robins Landon, whose completion of the mass has now been heard, does not believe in it for purely musical reasons. In terms of “emotional freedom and musical maturity”, Mozart’s earlier sacred works cannot be compared with the present one.
But perhaps it is also the sheer magnitude of this Missa solemnis that provokes quite different expectations. Because there is very emotional early sacred music by Mozart, but often only individual movements. They can be placed on a par with Bach’s B minor Mass and Beethoven’s “Missa solemnis” – all gigantic works that go beyond the scope of even a high mass. Mozart’s Mass in C minor, however, if its proportions seemed more practicable, it would have been composed to the end. Whatever the form, it was performed in the church during the high mass on October 26, 1783 in St. Peter. The church concert is a distinguished tradition of the Salzburg Festival, Philippe Herreweghe saw it the same way.