Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, Two Hundred Years On

About the Work

Beethoven set the Latin mass twice. The first setting was the Mass in C major of 1807. The second took him about four years and outgrew the occasion it was meant for.

It began with a deadline. Archduke Rudolph of Austria, a son of Emperor Leopold II, had been Beethoven’s piano and composition pupil for years and was his most important patron. In 1819 it became known that Rudolph was to be made Archbishop of Olmütz (now Olomouc) in Moravia, and Beethoven set out to write a solemn mass for the ceremony. The installation took place on 9 March 1820. The mass was not ready, and would not be for another three years. Sketches go back to the spring of 1819; the score was finished in 1823.

Part of the delay was study. Beethoven went back to plainchant and to the church music of Palestrina, Handel and Bach, and he had the Latin text translated word for word, with its accents marked, so that he could be sure of the sense of every phrase. The mass grew alongside the last piano sonatas and the Ninth Symphony, and it shares their appetite for fugue. At the head of the Kyrie he wrote “From the heart: may it go again to the heart”, and over the first bars the instruction “Mit Andacht” (with devotion). In a letter of 1822 he called it his greatest work.

Vienna did not hear it whole. The first complete performance was given in St Petersburg in April 1824, arranged by his Russian patron Prince Nikolai Galitzin. A month later, on 7 May 1824, the Kyrie, Credo and Agnus Dei were sung at the Kärntnertor Theatre in Vienna in the concert that also gave the first performance of the Ninth Symphony. The censors would not allow a mass to be sung in a theatre, so the three movements were announced as “hymns”.

The score calls for four vocal soloists, mixed chorus, and an orchestra of pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, organ and strings. A performance lasts between 70 and 80 minutes. The choral writing is famously hard: tempo, metre and dynamics change abruptly, sometimes from one syllable to the next, and two of the five movements end in large fugues.

Beethoven died in Vienna on 26 March 1827. The last of these three performances is given on that date, two hundred years later.

What to Listen For

Kyrie. Three broad chords of D major, then quiet. The woodwinds sing the melody before any voice has entered, and when the chorus calls “Kyrie”, a soloist answers each time. The middle section, “Christe eleison”, turns to B minor and a more flowing pulse, and belongs mainly to the solo quartet. The opening returns to close the movement, which is the calmest and most traditional of the five.

Gloria. The orchestra races upward and the chorus throws out the word “Gloria”. That gesture works as a motto and keeps coming back. Between its returns Beethoven follows the text phrase by phrase: a gentler “Gratias agimus”, introduced by the woodwinds, and a slow “Qui tollis” in which the soloists plead “miserere nobis”. The close is a fugue on “In gloria Dei Patris, Amen”. When it seems to be over, Beethoven brings back the shout of “Gloria” from the beginning, faster than before, although the liturgy asks for nothing of the kind.

Credo. The word “Credo” is set to a blunt two-note figure that returns like a refrain. The heart of the movement is quiet. For “Et incarnatus est” Beethoven writes in the old Dorian mode, an archaic sound in 1823, while a solo flute flutters high above the voices. The tenor then announces “Et homo factus est” (and was made man) and the harmony opens into D major. Hard accents mark the “Crucifixus”. The chorus proclaims “Et resurrexit” with no instruments at all, and the orchestra answers with rising scales. The movement ends with a double fugue on “Et vitam venturi saeculi” (and the life of the world to come), which starts gently and comes back at about twice the speed.

Sanctus and Benedictus. The Sanctus is again marked “Mit Andacht”. It begins low and dark, without flutes, oboes or violins, and with the four soloists in place of the chorus. “Pleni sunt coeli” and “Osanna” are short and fast. Then the orchestra alone plays a slow, veiled passage headed “Praeludium”, standing where an organist would once have improvised during the service. Out of it a solo violin enters at the top of its range and slowly descends. It stays for the whole of the Benedictus, singing above the voices.

Agnus Dei. The prayer for mercy opens in B minor with the lower voices, slow and dark. When the music turns to D major for “Dona nobis pacem”, Beethoven adds a heading: “Prayer for inner and outer peace”. Twice the peace is threatened. First, drums and trumpets sound a march and the soloists cry out again for mercy. Later the orchestra breaks in with a jagged fugal passage of its own. Each time the chorus takes up its plea again. The ending is brief: a last “pacem”, a few bars from the orchestra, and nothing more.