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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: MAR-MEC |
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MASS, IN MUSIC: I. Polyphonic Masses.The composition of musical settings of the Mass plays a part in the history of music which is of special
scheme . The practical limits of the church service made it impossible to break them up by setting each clause to a separate movement
special
worship , it inspired composers in direct proportion to their piety and depth of mind. Of course there were many false methods of attacking the art-problem, and many other relationships, true and false, between the complexity of the settings of the various parts of the Mass and of motets. The story of the action of the council of Trent on the subject of corruption of church music is told elsewhere (see Music and PALESTRINA); and it has been recently paralleled by a decree of Pope Pius X., which has restored the 16th-century polyphonic Mass to a permanent place in the Roman Catholic Church music.2. Instrumental Masses in the Neapolitan Form.The next definite stage in the musical history of the Mass was attained by the Neapolitan composers who were first to reach musical coherence after the monodic revolution at the beginning of the 17th century. The fruit of their efforts came to maturity in the Masses of Mozart and Haydn. By this time the resources of music were such that the long and varied text of the Gloria and Credo inevitably either overbalanced the scheme or met with an obviously perfunctory treatment. It is almost impossible, without asceticism of a radically inartistic kind, to treat with the resources of instrumental music and free harmony such passages as that from the Crucif xus to the Resurrexit, without an emotional contrast which inevitably throws any natural treatment of the Sanctus into the background, and makes the A gnus Dei an inadequate conclusion to the musical scheme. So unfavourable were the conditions of 18th-century music for the formation of a good ecclesiastical style that only a very small proportion of Mozart's and Haydn's Mass music may be said to represent their ideas of religious music at all. The best features of their Masses are those that combine faithfulness to the Neapolitan forms with a contrapuntal richness such as no Neapo-titan composer ever achieved. Thus Mozart's most perfect as well as most ecclesiastical example is his extremely terse Mass in F, written at the age of seventeen, which is scored simply for four-part chorus and solo voices accompanied by the organ with a largely independent bass and by two violins mostly in independent real parts. This scheme, with the addition of a pair of trumpets and drums and, occasionally, oboes, forms the normal orchestra of 18th-century Masses developed or degenerated from this model. Trombones often played with the three lower voices, a practice of high antiquity surviving from a time when there were soprano trombones or cornetti (Zincken, a sort of treble serpent) to play with the sopranos. 3. Symphonic Masses.The enormous dramatic development in the symphonic music of Beethoven made the problem of the Mass with orchestral accompaniment almost insoluble. This makes it all the more remarkable that Beethoven's second and only important Mass (in D, Op. 123) is not only the most dramatic ever penned but is, perhaps, the last classical Mass that is thoughtfully based upon the liturgy
triumph
Schubert's Masses show rather the influence of Beethoven's not very impressive first Mass, which they easily surpass in interest
4. Lutheran Masses.Music with Latin words is not excluded from the Lutheran Church, and the Kyrie and Gloria are frequently sung in succession and entitled a Mass. Thus the Four Short Masses of Bach are called short, not because they are on a small scale, which is far from being the case, but because they consist only of the Kyrie and Gloria. Bach's method is to treat each clause of his text as a separate movement
liturgy
The most interesting of all these adaptations is the setting of the words: " Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi saeculi.AMEN." Obviously the greatest difficulty in any elaborate instrumental setting of the Credo is the inevitableanti-climax after the Resurrexit. Bach contrives to give this anti-climax a definite artistic value; all the more from the fact that his Crucifixus and Resurrexit, and the contrast between them, are among the most sublime and directly impressive things in all music. To the end of his Resurrexit chorus he appends an orchestral ritornello, summing up the material of the chorus in the most formal possible way, and thereby utterly destroying all sense of finality as a member of a large group, while at the same time not in the least impairing the force and contrast of the wholethat contrast having ineffaceably asserted itself at the moment when it occurred. After this the aria " Et in spiritum sanctum," in which the next dogmatic clauses are enshrined like relics in a casket, furnishes a beautiful decorative design on which the listener can repose his mind; and then comes the voluminous ecclesiastical fugue, Confiteor union baptisma, leading, as through the door and world-wide spaces of the Catholic Church, to that veil which is not all darkness to the eye of faith. At the words " Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum " the music plunges suddenly into a slow series of some of the most sublime and mysterious modulations ever written, until it breaks out as suddenly into a vivace e allegro of broad but terse design, which comes to its climax very rapidly and ends as abruptly as possible, the last chord being carefully written as a short note without a pause. This gives the utmost possible effect of finality to the whole Credo, and contrasts admirably with the coldly formal instrumental end of the Resurrexit three movements further back. Now, such subtleties seem as if they must be unconscious on the part of the composer; yet here Bach is so far aware of his reasons that his vivace e allegro is an arrangement of the second chorus of a church cantata, Gott man lobet dick in der Stille; and in the cantata the chorus has introductory and final symphonies and a middle section with a da capo/5. The Requiem.The Missa pro defunctis or Requiem Mass has a far less definite musical history than the ordinary Mass; and such special musical forms as it has produced have little in common with each other. The text of the Dies Irae so imperatively demands either a very dramatic elaboration or none at all, that even in the 16th century it could not possibly be set to continuous,,,music on the lines of the Gloria and Credo. Fortunately, however, the Gregorian canto
With modern orchestral conditions the text seems positively to demand an unecclesiastical, not to say sensational, style, and probably the only instrumental Requiem Masses which can be said to be great church music are the sublime unfinished work of Mozart (the antecedents of which would be a very interesting subject) and the two beautiful works by Cherubini. These latter, however, tend to be funereal rather than uplifting. The only other artistic solution of the problem is to follow Berlioz, Verdi and Dvorak in the complete renunciation of all ecclesiastical style. Brahms's Deutsches requiem has nothing to do with the Mass for the dead, being simply a large choral work on a text compiled from the Bible by the composer. (D. F. T.) End of Article: MASS, IN If you wish, you can link directly to this article.
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