After Verdi, we stay in opera spheres. Puccini is the composer of popular operas, which are sometimes great, but also sometimes rather sentimental (for example "Che gelida manina" and the final scene from La Boheme). Despite that, I like his work much better than that of Verdi - it is more modern. To my surprise, he also wrote a traditional Mass in his younger years - and here we indeed already find the lyrical opera composer. Especially the Gloria is very positive and beautiful.
Giacomo Puccini's Messa or Messa a quattro voci (today more widely known under the apocryphal name of "Messa di Gloria") is a mass composed for orchestra and choir (SATB) with tenor and baritone soloists. Strictly speaking, the piece is a full Mass, not a true Messa di Gloria (which contains only the Kyrie and Gloria and omits the Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei).
Giacomo Puccini's Messa or Messa a quattro voci (today more widely known under the apocryphal name of "Messa di Gloria") is a mass composed for orchestra and choir (SATB) with tenor and baritone soloists. Strictly speaking, the piece is a full Mass, not a true Messa di Gloria (which contains only the Kyrie and Gloria and omits the Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei).
Puccini was destined initially to be a composer of religious music as the scion of an ancient lineage of composing church musicians - but he became an opera composer. He wrote only one religious work, the Messa composed as a graduation project at the Istituto Musicale Pacini. The first performance took place in Lucca on July 12, 1880. The Credo had already been written and performed in 1878 and was originally intended by Puccini as an independent work. The complete manuscript of the Messa was never published by Puccini, and although the work was well received at its first performance, it was not performed again until 1952 (first in Chicago and then in Naples). He did, however, reuse material from it in other compositions. Music from the Agnus Dei was used in his opera Manon Lescaut and that from the Kyrie in Edgar.
If Puccini's contemporaries had any doubts that his musical future was to be in the theater, hearing his mass would surely have dispelled them. From the first notes, with the soaring, sweet, fugal elaborations of 'eleison' in the opening lines of the 'Kyrie', the chorus begins a dramatic celebration of the ritual accompanying the sacrament, which is sustained throughout its performance.
The 'Gloria' makes clear how the mass came to acquire its apocryphal title. A breathtaking tour de force of compelling excitement for choir, orchestra and audience, it takes up almost half the entire work - indeed, divided into nine separable parts, it constitutes almost a work in its own right for choir and tenor soloist.
Conceived initially as a self-contained work, the Credo has a similarly architectonic structure to the Gloria, though it is not quite as long. It opens with a forceful statement of 'Credo in unum Deo' which is linked to the following 'Patrem omnipotentem' and 'Qui propter' by a chromatic orchestral accompaniment in which woodwind play as important a part as did the brass in the Gloria. 'Et incarnatus' is scored operatically, in G major for tenor and chorus.
The Sanctus is somewhat perfunctory, no more than a simple liturgical statement. It moves to a smooth, confident baritone solo for the Benedictus before a final, choral hosanna. The closing Agnus Dei was used by Puccini in Manon Lescaut, where it is termed 'madrigale' and sung by a bored heroine as she performs her morning toilet. Its gentle pastoral character is sustained here by a lilting tenor solo. The final entry of the chorus comes with the triplets of the final plea of 'dona pacem', echoed by the orchestra in the closing bars of the work.
Listen to: hr-Sinfonieorchester ∙ MDR Rundfunkchor ∙ Solisten ∙ Eliahu Inbal
Choral Masterworks
[Description of the Messa partly based on and edited from this programme note; also contains information from Dutch-language Wikipedia]