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

eturns several times. The Credo is based upon a four-note tag later to become famous
in the ‘Jupiter’ symphony; although hardly matching the splendour of its later
occurrence, it is here treated with considerable technical resource, alongside passages
of galant homophony. This sort of combination is hardly specific to this mass—only
the most perfunctory Missae Brevae are quite devoid of counterpoint, while those
attributed to Mozart which contain little else have turned out to be copies of works by
Eberlin or Leopold. Nor is it specific to Mozart alone: Michael and Joseph Haydn,
Leopold Hofmann, and Albrechtsberger—with greater or lesser imagination, just about
every church composer of the time, showed the same stylistic eclecticism. In other
words, the fusion of Baroque and Classical textures, such an important part of the
development of instrumental music during the 1790s, was already a fait accompli in
the church music of the 1770s.
Does this mean that we should accord Mozart’s Salzburg masses (and those of
his contemporaries) the same epochal significance we do to his and Haydn’s later
symphonies and string quartets? It would be possible to argue along these lines; and
equally possible to dispute such a conclusion, on analytical and aesthetic grounds. But
such arguments are fundamentally irrelevant if they ignore the very different cultural
terrain these two bodies of work inhabit. They are part of two quite different stories,
one—the development of Classical instrumental music—of central cultural importance
(part of what Tovey called ‘the main stream of music’), the other—mid eighteenth-
century church music—of much more limited significance. The first has a narrative
dialectic of almost Hegelian sweep; tracing how the textural density and complexity of
the late Baroque was swept away by the homophony of the early galant composers, 62
until the later works of Haydn and Mozart were able to create a new synthesis of
Baroque sophistication with galant clarity (Kirkendale’s ‘terza prattica’). The second
62 We have seen, of course, how this was not entirely true; but these exceptions do not invalidate it as a
generalisation.
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