Nic’s Notes for B Minor Mass

One of the first facts that a student of music history will learn is that two of the greatest composers of Baroque music, J. S Bach and G. F Handel, were born less than a month apart and not far from each other. Their careers turned out very differently: Handel was a widely travelled composer based for much of his life in London while Bach hardly ventured more than few hundred miles from his home. He probably never had more than a glimpse of the sea when he visited Lübeck. Handel spent much of his life writing Italian opera while Bach composed music for the Protestant Church. Nor did they ever meet, though not for want of trying on Bach’s part. But on occasion their lives did run on parallel tracks, especially in the latter part of their composing lives.

When the two were in their early fifties, both underwent a career shift. Handel’s health and finances suffered badly in the late 1730’s as Italian Opera went out of fashion. To restore his fortunes, he turned to writing oratorios, both sacred and secular, in the English language. The result was so successful that by 1759 he had become a national institution. He died a rich man and was given a fine burial in Westminster Abbey. At about the same time, Bach had a less dramatic shift in his career but a major one nonetheless. Between 1723 and 1736, he had composed enough music to fulfill his obligations for the churches in Leipzig. He had completed several cycles of cantatas for the church year, three Passions, the Christmas Oratorio, the Easter and Ascension Oratorios and a number of other works for special days in the church calendar, such as the Magnificat. He could perhaps have rested on his laurels but instead he turned to preserving his musical legacy. But it went deeper than that.  In 1735, he compiled a history of the Bach family (Ursprung der musicalisch-Bachischen Familie) which included a family tree with his comments on more than fifty musical Bachs over five generations. He also began to edit, revise earlier compositions, and organize them perhaps with a view to publication.

It is worth noting that in Bach’s time, Leipzig was the cultural capital of the region. The University was one of the largest in the German-speaking world and the twice-yearly Book Fair had been the biggest since the 1630s with a fine international reputation to match. Several of Bach’s performances and publications coincided either with the Easter or the Michaelmass Book Fairs. 

In addition to organizing and revising his compositions, two major new works, The Art of Fugue and The Musical Offering would cement his legacy as a composer of matchless intellectual merit. But Bach during the early 1740’s also embarked on expanding his knowledge of the great masters of the past. Not only did he produce performing material for two Palestrina Masses but he also turned to more recent Italian composers who wrote in the stile antico such as Caldara, Lotti, Bassani  and Gasparini. Finally, in about 1746/7, Bach arranged Pergolesí’s Stabat Mater as the motet Tilge, höchster, meine Sünden. All of this Italian repertoire would influence music of the crowning glory of his final years, the miraculous Mass in B Minor.

Today, we think of the Mass as one large-scale work and that is how it is always performed but in Bach’s time, it could never have been given complete in a Protestant church. (NB. Could is correct. The full Mass was banned in Lutheran Churches) Only certain parts of the Catholic Mass could be sung in Latin in a Lutheran service. This perhaps strengthens the concept that it stands more as a monument to Bach’s genius rather than a work for practical use. It may come as a surprise to some to learn that only a small part of the music of the Mass was actually composed especially for it. Most of the movements began life in other works, though sometimes Bach made substantial revisions as the Mass took shape. Not all the original sources survive but the earliest dateable one is the ‘Crucifixus’ which started life in the cantata BWV 12 first performed in April 1714, about thirty-five years before the completion of the whole Mass. So, one can truly say that the Mass nearly spans his whole career. Where the sources are unknown, eagle-eyed musicologists have pored over the autograph manuscript to make the most intelligent speculations as to what the originals might have been. Generally, where a manuscript is free from emendations or errors, the more likely it is to have been copied directly from an earlier source. Less tidy movements can often reveal how Bach revised an earlier piece. Even he could make the occasional mistake, and these are most revealing. For example, if his original source was in a different key, he sometimes made errors of transposition. The Mass is unusual in demanding a five-part chorus with two separate soprano lines. Sometimes, as possibly in the opening Kyrie fugue, his original seems to have been for four-part chorus. Bach therefore had to redistribute the vocal lines to accommodate an extra voice. Again, the odd error is a giveaway. In the ‘Resurrexit’, his source may have been a lost birthday cantata for the King of Saxony (BWV Anhang 9) for four -part choir. At one point, while copying, Bach inadvertently wrote the name of King (Augustus) instead of a Latin word from the text of the Mass. Towards the end of his life, Bach began to lose his eyesight, something that is poignantly clear in the manuscript of the ‘Confiteor’ which is almost the only movement for which there is no earlier source. Here he was composing directly into the score. There are numerous alterations, and because of his impending blindness his handwriting is often unclear.  Indeed, at one point the score is even now illegible. His son C.P.E. Bach tried to make sense of it but his suggestions are perhaps not definitive.

Aside from individual movements being from other pieces, there is one major early source for the Kyrie and Gloria, two parts of the Mass that could be performed in a Lutheran service. Bach arrived in Leipzig in 1723 but his appointment was controversial. Some of the town council felt that the Kantor was basically a school teacher while a less conservative faction thought the whoever filled the post should be a composer of repute who could bring lustre to the town. By 1730, this uncomfortable situation had come to a head. Bach thought of himself primarily as a composer and actively looked around for a more congenial position. In addition, he wished to bolster his reputation outside the confines of Leipzig. In a letter to Friedrich August II of Saxony dated in July 1733, Bach griped about how badly he was being treated in Leipzig and requested a court title to help against the philistines there. Accompanying this letter was what he called ‘this small product of that science which I have attained in Musique’. This was the Kyrie and Gloria of what became the first two parts of the B minor Mass in a presentation set of material compiled with the help of his elder sons. For example, the young Emmanuel Bach, not quite twenty, copied the soprano parts and his father made corrections. Interestingly, since everything was copied on paper from Dresden, the male members of the family made the trip with their father. However, there is no evidence that the work was ever performed and Bach did not receive the title of Hofcompositeur until late in 1736.

1749/50 was the final time that Bach and Handel’s lives ran in parallel. Both composers began to go blind as can be seen in the manuscripts of the Mass and Jephtha, Handel’s last major work. But the similarities do not end there for both composers were operated on by the same oculist and charlatan, John Taylor. ‘Dr’. Taylor claimed that his surgeries were successful, though the opposite was true. Bach submitted to the knife twice and four months later he was dead. Over the next few decades, the score of the Mass was copied several times but the original was entrusted to the care of Emmanuel. Bach. It was he who gave the first performances of Credo in 1786. In Berlin in 1819, the Singakademie had some rehearsals of the complete work. The 10-year-old Mendelssohn sang in the choir! The Mass was first published complete in the 1850’s and it slowly became recognized as Bach’s last major work. It appears that one of the earliest performances in the USA was in St. Patrick’s Church in San Francisco about 1870. It seems most fitting, therefore, that we should be presenting this profound, magnificent masterpiece in the Bay Area a little over a hundred and fifty years later.