Johann Sebastian Bach

Mass in B Minor, BWV 232* 

Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, Germany on March 31, 1685 and died in Leipzig, Germany on July 28, 1750. The first complete public performance of the Mass in B Minor took place in Leipzig, Germany in 1859 under the direction of Bach scholar Karl Reidl. It is scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes doubling oboe d’amore, 2 bassoons, 1 horn, 3 trumpets, timpani and strings (first violins, second violins, violas, cellos and basses).

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The Mass in B Minor of Johann Sebastian Bach has been recognized as a masterpiece of Western music for nearly three hundred years. Its early history, however, gave no hint of the popularity and esteem it would eventually enjoy. Completed shortly before Bach’s death in 1750, the “Great Mass”, as it was sometimes called, existed first in the imaginations of the few scholars who knew of its existence; it was not heard complete until 1859, when Karl Reidl led its first public performance in Leipzig, Germany. Before that, Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel had performed a few portions of the work in Hamburg, and brief parts of it may have been used here and there in church services. Composer Carl Friedrich Zelter, and early Bach enthusiast, is known to have led private read-throughs of the Mass in Berlin in 1811.

Bach himself almost certainly did not hear the piece before his death and scholars question whether he even intended the work to be performed. At a bit under two hours’ duration, it is much too long for any standard church service. Its complicated choral and solo vocal parts and its complex orchestral writing put it out of reach of the forces available to almost any church, historic or modern. The composer, after many years spent providing music for the churches and schools that employed him, made no secret of his wish to leave a testament to his own skill. He had spent his work life studying and perfecting his compositional craft, in the process arriving at the apogee of contrapuntal mastery. The Mass in B Minor, The Art of Fugue, and the Musical Offering, among other late works, bear witness to his surpassing skill.

The art of musical counterpoint (from which the word “contrapuntal” derives), broadly defined, involves the combination of melodic lines with such skill that they form compelling harmonies and help to shape musical structure. J. S. Bach reached a pinnacle of skill in counterpoint that has never been surpassed. His particular genius was to write melodies that could be combined with themselves, upside down, backward and forward, at almost any musical interval and in any note value, while remaining musically expressive and emotionally satisfying. Later generations of composers stood in awe of his skill, emulating it while never surpassing it. Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms excelled in counterpoint, but their genius led them in other directions and they never quite equaled Bach’s light, deft, touch.

“Mass in B Minor” was not Bach’s title, but it is the one by which this work is now universally known. And once the piece was heard in public, it found its way rapidly to many parts of the world, gradually achieving masterpiece, or perhaps even cult, status. The first performance in the United States took place in Bethlehem, PA in March of 1900, and the Bach Choir of Bethlehem has performed it every year since as the culmination of its May Festival. 

If you have heard the work live many times in your life, you may have noticed that the size of the performing forces has reduced significantly in recent years. Performances in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries involved large choirs and orchestras, with singers in the hundreds and fifty or sixty players. Conductors felt no compunction about adding parts for instruments not in Bach’s score. Grandeur was the aim, though it hardly served the musical content of this work or many other 18th-century pieces subjected to similar treatment.

Post World War II, scholars and thoughtful musicians took the time to sift through early church records and printed performance accounts to learn what Bach was accustomed to hearing. They discovered that he might have had as few as ten or twelve singers in his choir, and that orchestras could have been as small as twelve or fifteen players. These ideas shocked many, and change came slowly, but as conductors experimented with smaller forces, they found that what they gave up in massiveness they gained in flexibility and agility. Tempos could move quickly and lightly, textures gained transparency, light shone in places long obscure.

Bach was ill and blind by the time he finished assembling the work we hear at this concert. He had begun work on parts of it as early as 1733, returning to it into his last years. In common with most 18th century composers, he also recycled music from his own earlier works, adjusting words and music to fit each other. Bach’s mind remained lucid and acute to the end of his life, and his curiosity and genius never abandoned him. He assembled the disparate parts of this mass with confidence. It was his great inspiration to divide the large parts of the mass into many shorter parts. In so doing, he was able to pace the work much as an opera composer would, building to dramatic peaks using all the performers, exploring quiet emotions with one or two solo voices and a few instruments. He changes colors with care, using mournful oboes d’amore and festive trumpets and timpani sparingly. The choir anchors the piece with brilliant choruses, but also with simply harmonized chorale melodies that would have been familiar to most people during Bach’s life. These markers are points of repose for listeners today.

Bach intended this Mass in B Minor to be a testament of his profound religious faith, but also of his equally unshakable faith in his own skill and in the power of music to endure through human history. He left this music confident that future generations would study it, perform it, hear it, and be nourished by it. We are fortunate that we continue to have this opportunity today.

*BWV denotes Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (literally Bach Works Catalogue), a catalogue of compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach edited by Wolfgang Schmieder and first published in 1950. Later editions appeared in 1990 and 2022. Works are grouped by genre, not chronologically; hence the Mass in B Minor, completed at the end of Bach’s life, carries a low catalogue number while other earlier works have numbers over 1,000.

– Martin Webster