Did Mozart write church music out of enthusiasm or as an obligation? Mozart wrote some 70 religious works - most of them during his employment in Salzburg, from 1773-77. Perhaps Mozart's motives were mixed - and the fact that he had to write them didn't mean that Mozart put less effort in them. But in the summer of 1782, five years after his employment in Salzburg had ended and Mozart was living in Vienna (where he earned his living writing secular music), he suddenly started writing another mass - a huge one - without a commission. The story of the composition of the Mass in C minor is very uncertain and almost as mysterious as that of Mozart's Requiem. Was it perhaps intended as a "votive gift" for his wedding?
Mozart had married Constanze on Aug. 4, and in a letter Mozart had previously proclaimed that if he brought Constanze to Salzburg as his wife he would perform a newly-composed mass there. The plan was to hold a performance of the mass on Oct. 26, 1783, in the church of St. Peter's Abbey in Salzburg, with Constanze taking the role of soprano soloist. If this performance indeed did take place, Mozart must have included parts of previously written masses, as the work was still unfinished and a mass must always be performed in its entirety. Large sections of the "Credo" and the entire "Agnus Dei" were missing (and are still missing) - what Mozart did write for the C-minor Mass were the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo (through "Et incarnatus est"), Sanctus, and Benedictus. For contemporary performances, arrangements by the American Mozart-scholar H. C. Robbins Landon and others are used to complete the music.
There has been much speculation about the reasons why Mozart stopped
work on the Mass. Several causes may be responsible - perhaps in the first place
the painful death of his son Raimund Leopold, barely two months old, on
August 9, 1783, or else the restrictions on church music introduced by
Emperor Joseph II, which left little hope for further performances. Or
perhaps we must seek the reason in Mozart's turning away from dogmatic Catholicism toward
Freemasonry in 1784?
Almost as proof the Mozart didn't intend to finish the Mass in C minor, in 1785 he took the music of the Kyrie and Gloria, added a couple of arias and so the Italian cantata Davide penitente, K. 469, was born. He just reused the parts he had already written, and that was the end of it.
The most striking feature of the C minor Mass is its stylistic variety. Moods shift constantly, sometimes dazzling, sometimes movingly sombre. The Mass in C minor is a monumental work that went beyond the scope of Mozart's previous Mass compositions. In those years, Mozart came to terms with the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, which he became acquainted with through the mediation of Baron Gottfried van Swieten and which triggered a creative crisis in Mozart. The fugues at the end of the "Gloria" and the "Sanctus" show the extent to which Mozart infused the contrapuntal style with his own spirit. The "Great Mass in C minor" is Mozart's most ambitious composition in this genre.
Listen to the The Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and the Netherlands Radio Choir, conducted by Markus Stenz in a recording by the Dutch television.
Choral Masterworks