Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Mass in C minor KV 427

The origins of Mass in C minor can be found in a vow Mozart made to his fiancée Constance (1783). He promised that if he was ever able to marry her, he would write a great mass cycle on his return to his hometown of Salzburg.
Although Mozart’s matrimonial wish was fulfilled, the vow fared much worse. The composer did write an hour or so of music, yet his original plans for the work were so ambitious (almost every part was to be a sequence of separate pieces) that he was unable to complete this task. Thus Mozart left a part of Kyrie, an eight-segment Gloria, two fragments of Credo, a Sanctus and a Benedictus. The causes for abandoning his work at such an advanced stage will probably never be known. The work might have been interrupted (and later discarded) for other, more pressing composing projects or, perhaps, reasons of religious nature…
The remaining fragments are of the highest quality, even if Mozart did not achieve his ideal of stylistic purity. For Mass in C minor is a work that constantly oscillates between the model of opera theatre and that of sacred music, burdened with the rhetorical tradition of the Baroque. The first is visible in “Laudamus te” or “Et incarnatus,” both in fact virtuoso arias quite fit for any of the heroines of Mozart’s operas. Fragments from the other “extreme" are true pearls of sacred music. Noteworthy is the relatively high proportion of polyphony (the magnificent fugues in Kyrie or “Cum Sancto Spiritu”), although Mozart’s greatest achievement in Mass in C minor must be identified in the choral segment of “Qui tollis peccata mundi.” This densely chromatised passacaglia, constructed over a framework of falling bass and abounding in rhetorical and musical figures of pain, is ideally suited to the text on the world’s sins.
Although Mozart’s Mass in C minor is certainly not inferior to his (also unfinished) Requiem, the fact that the former did not come bundled with a romantic legend of being written in premonition of approaching death was probably the reason why – apart from a failed attempt at the beginning of the 20th century – it functioned solely as an unfinished work (while at least three versions of the ending to Requiem are known). However, the task of completing Mass in C minor has been recently undertaken by Robert D. Levin, eminent pianist and musicologist, on commission from Carnegie Hall and in agreement with conductor Helmuth Rilling. Levin meticulously filled in a number of missing links. Wherever possible, he used existing drafts by the composer and assumed models (e.g. fragments of a 1785 cantata, Davidde penitente, where Mozart developed some ideas drafted in Mass in C minor); where no clues were available – as was the case of Agnus Dei – he simply trusted his own ingenuity and stylistic intuition. If Levin’s work – highly acclaimed by American critics – will become a fixture in concert life will be decided in the nearest future – perhaps with the performance of the completed version of Mass in C minor at this year’s Beethoven Festival in Warsaw.

Marcin Gmys