Mass in Bb, Harmoniemesse
First performance: September 8, 1802
Vocal soloists (SATB)
Chorus (SATB)
Orchestra: Flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, strings, organ
Program Notes by Martin Pearlman
Composed in 1802, Haydn's Harmoniemesse is his last completed composition. By that time, the seventy-year old Haydn, celebrated as the greatest living composer, held what was essentially an emeritus position, sitting at table with Prince Esterhazy himself and being obliged only to compose one mass each year to commemorate the princess's name day. But composing a major choral work each year was taxing on a man who felt himself to be old and in failing health, and he was no doubt glad to be freed of this obligation for the future.
The Harmoniemesse was given its first performance on September 8 of 1802, the princess's name day, at a mass in her honor. After the mass, the invited guests returned to the Esterhazy palace for a dinner which offered scores of various dishes and many fine wines. The round of toasts, including one to Haydn, was punctuated by trumpets and drums in the gallery and the sound of cannon from outside the hall. The evening concluded with a ball.
The Harmoniemesse, named for its unusually large "Harmonie" (or wind) section, is the last -- and many would say the greatest -- of the series of six masses which Haydn wrote toward the end of his life. It has always been held in special esteem by musicians and others who knew it, but, being a mass, it has never enjoyed the wide popularity of his two great oratorios, The Creation and The Seasons, which date from the same period.
This mass has an enormous stylistic range, from fugues that look back to the Baroque to music that comes out of the Enlightenment or that looks forward to early Romanticism, all of it beautifully blended through Haydn's musical personality. Emotionally the work ends on a triumphant note, but it runs an entire gamut, beginning with what Haydn scholar H. C. Robbins Landon has called "an enormous slow movement, a surging Poco adagio which rolls on like some mighty river. Here is an entirely new kind of Kyrie," he writes, "mystical, slow-paced, exalted, but also filled with a sense of nostalgia. This is the real Spätstil, a genuine farewell to music."
Boston Baroque Performances
Mass in Bb, Harmoniemesse
March 6, 1992
NEC’s Jordan Hall, Boston, MA
Martin Pearlman, conductor
Soloists:
Nancy Armstrong, soprano
Eleanor Kelley, mezzo-soprano
Stanley Warren, tenor
David Ripley, bass-baritone