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

is a much less dramatic tale, of cautious (if often pleasing and interesting)
accommodation between liturgical conventions and musical innovation. We have seen
Landon’s bold attempt to lift Haydn’s late masses out of one story and place them in
the other, by interpreting them as the final stage of Haydn’s symphonic development—
an attempt that seems to have been at least partly successful. I am not about to try
anything similar here with Mozart’s Salzburg church music. Nevertheless, it would be
worth exploring further, establishing differences and similarities of procedure, and
asking whether the earlier church music of Haydn and Mozart has any bearing upon
the instrumental music they were to write ten or twenty years later.
THE ‘GREAT’ C MINOR MASS, K. 427
The circumstances that led to this remarkable mass remaining incomplete are
mysterious enough; even more so is the question of what called it into existence in the
first place. As we have already pointed out, eighteenth-century composers did not go
around producing major works ‘on spec’, in the hope of finding a performer or a
publisher. What was it that set Mozart to work on a mass which, if completed, would
have been so very much larger than any of his others, equivalent in scope to Haydn’s
‘St Cecilia’ mass, Bach’s B minor mass, or Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis? Einstein
could write: ‘This work is his entirely personal coming to terms with God and with his
art, with what he conceived to be “true church music”’, thus dissociating it from any
specific context whatsoever. 63 This would be entirely believable if it had been written
about Beethoven; but so far as we can tell, Mozart was not in the habit of regarding his
music as a ‘personal coming to terms’ with anything except particular musical
problems, nor did he have much in the way of strong opinions about ‘true church
63 Mozart, his character, his work, tr. A. Mendel and N. Broder (New York: Oxford University Press,
1945), p.348.
290