J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

Stray experiments of an idle hour (of which, goodness knows, he had few enough), it
is hardly surprising that they were dropped when difficulties arose or distractions came
up. There was, on the other hand, one highly public arena in which there was a steady
and constant demand for fugal writing: the church.
CHURCH MUSIC
H. C. Robbins Landon’s brilliant reinterpretation of Haydn’s late masses as a
continuation of his symphonic achievement gave significant impetus to their
rehabilitation during the twentieth century. 57 No one has taken up the cause of
Mozart’s masses with quite the same effect, although they are frequently performed
and have many admirers. Landon was able to argue that Haydn’s masses were central
to his achievement; perhaps even its culmination; but such an argument is harder to
sustain in relation to Mozart’s liturgical output. Chiefly confined to the first half of his
life—and it is of course the works of his maturity that excite us the most—his masses
are inextricably associated with conditions of servitude in Salzburg that we know he
detested. 58 Certainly, after he arrived in Vienna, he undertook only two more sizeable
liturgical works—neither of them finished, both of them significantly different in
approach from his Salzburg masses.
We should not of course view Mozart’s entire career in Salzburg through the
lenses of his later disillusionment. During the first years of Colloredo’s reign Mozart
was very active in the composition of church music, and the years 1779-80 show a
57 ‘“Epilogue”: Haydn’s symphonic legacy (the six masses of 1796-1802)’, The symphonies of Joseph
Haydn (London: Universal Edition & Rockliff, 1955), pp.594-604. Martin Chusid has developed
this idea further in ‘Some observations on liturgy, text and structure in Haydn’s late masses’ in
Studies in eighteenth-century music: a tribute to Karl Geiringer on his seventieth birthday (London:
Allen and Unwin, 1970), dividing the late masses into so-called ‘vocal symphonies’.
58 By eighteenth-century standards the Mozarts’ conditions of employment were perfectly comfortable,
if not especially inspiring—but our habit of seeing everything from Wolfgang’s perspective prevents
us from regarding Archbishop Colloredo as anything other than as an inflexible tyrant.
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