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

the light, homophonic example of Reutter and Wagenseil, here Mozart emulates the
rather grave, late-Baroque style of Eberlin. While not quite fugal, the Kyrie strikes a
serious tone with its free contrapuntal writing—at no point do we find the vocal
pyrotechnics of Haydn’s earliest masses (Ex.4.9).
Later in the Gloria and Sanctus there are perfect examples of the ‘rauschende
Violinen à la Reutter’ (not a specifically Viennese texture, but ubiquitous in Italianate
church music of the period), 61 but the voices’ contrapuntal independence frequently
emerges despite this. Two sections could be described as fugues in their own right,
predictably enough the ‘cum sancto Spiritu’ (Gloria) and ‘et vitam venturi’ (Credo);
both consist of a single exposition and conclusion.
The vast expansion of scale in the ‘Waisenhaus-Messe’ (K.139/47a), a
generously proportioned cantata-mass composed only a month or two later, is thus
quite remarkable. Again there are fugues upon the ‘cum sancto Spiritu’ and ‘et vitam
venturi’; but instead of being content with a single exposition, Mozart now extends
these sections to ninety-six and seventy-six bars respectively—no mean achievement
61 It is C. F. Pohl’s phrase—see B. C. MacIntyre, The Viennese concerted mass of the early classic
period (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986), p.104, fn. 37.
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