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

for great stretches of vocal as well as contrapuntal virtuosity; with Mozart, as with
Haydn, these movements remind us more perhaps of Hasse and Porpora than his own
mature style. Also common to both is the fact that, unlike Haydn’s late masses,
neither of them exploit the sophisticated sonata forms of the mature Classical style to
any great extent; both depend largely on relatively simple binary and ritornello
structures. In the case of Haydn this was probably because his mass was a direct,
unreflective continuation of the grand Viennese tradition of Fux, Reutter, and
Gassmann (it had been written in 1766, near the beginning of the evolution of Haydn’s
mature instrumental style). With Mozart, by contrast, it may have been a consequence
of the attempt to integrate the essentially foreign idiom of Bach and Handel into his
own style—which could be said to have been almost swamped by the effort.
Nevertheless, far as it might seem from Mozart’s normal style, the Kyrie (for
example) has a sinuous expressiveness that is all Mozart’s own. Is it a fugue? No
more so than the Kyrie of K.192/186f. Is it fugal? More, I think, than any other Kyrie
of Mozart’s; but as with many movements by Handel, the high density of imitative
writing is obscured by the way in which the (quite orthodox) groups of fugal entries
are integrated into the surrounding texture. No indication is given at first of the
contrapuntal possibilities of the opening theme, presented homophonically by the
orchestra. The choir then enters with something of a fugal red-herring: what appears
to be a canon at the octave turns out to be simply an arpeggiation of the tonic, each
voice taking in as much of the chord as its range allows. This magnificently sonorous
exordium introduces the real business of the movement, which gets under way in bar 9
with the exposition of a double fugue. One subject, a variant of the old chromatic
tetrachord (much more fluid than that of K.154/385k or the string quartet K.173)
appears in the soprano; the countersubject is a close variant of the opening theme (the
direction of the sequence reversed), present first in the orchestra and then taken up by
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