The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Johann Sebastian Bach · a setting of the Latin Ordinary of the Mass, BWV 232 · four parts in the autograph: Missa, Symbolum Nicenum, Sanctus, and Osanna to Dona nobis pacem · twenty-seven numbers for soloists, a choir of five voices as the norm, and orchestra with three trumpets · in Latin, with the Kyrie’s Greek · about 100 to 125 minutes in performance
Mode
A concert Mass before the concert Mass existed: the Latin Ordinary set clause by clause, in every manner from Gregorian chant and the stile antico to the galant aria
Mythos
Descent, death and rising: a Creed built as a cross, with the Crucifixus at its centre; the thrice-holy of Isaiah’s vision; thanks that becomes peace
Phase
The whole Ordinary from Kyrie to pacem; four parts; B minor at the first bar, D major at the last, G minor at the furthest point
Presentation
Concert music; twenty-seven numbers, seventeen distinct choruses, six arias and three duets; five voices as the standing texture, six at the Sanctus and eight at the Osanna; three trumpets and timpani
Register
From a five-voice cry on “Kyrie” and a chant over a walking bass to a soprano with solo violin in the Dresden manner; from a burial at a whisper to the Sanctus in triplets
Scale
Thirty-five years of one composer’s work, 1714 to 1749, in one score; the maker of heaven and earth and one governor’s name; about two hours
Governing Proposition
A Lutheran cantor sets the whole Catholic Ordinary at a scale no service could use, gathers into it music from thirty-five years of his work and every manner from Gregorian chant to the newest Dresden aria, and gives its last petition, for peace, the music of its thanksgiving. The wager of the work is that one confession can be made in every voice there is, and that belief is confessed through the fear of death, not around it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The Mass begins with a cry. Five voices, two sopranos, alto, tenor and bass, with the whole orchestra, sing four bars of slow chords, Adagio, in B minor, on two Greek words: “Kyrie eleison”
“Lord, have mercy.” Then the orchestra begins a fugue, Largo, the tenors take its subject from the instruments, and the other voices enter in turn. The Christe eleison, in D major, is a duet for the two sopranos over violins in unison, in the manner of the Dresden opera. The second Kyrie, in F sharp minor, is in four voices, alla breve, in the stile antico, the old style of Palestrina as the eighteenth century understood it, the instruments doubling the voices. Three movements, three manners, one petition: the work is announced in its first ten minutes.
The Kyrie and Gloria were composed in 1733. August the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, died on 1 February of that year, and in the months of court mourning that followed no concerted music was allowed in Leipzig’s churches. Bach, Thomaskantor since 1723, used the silence. He presented a set of parts for the two movements to the new Elector, Friedrich August II, at Dresden, with a petition dated 27 July 1733 asking for a court title. The parts survive in Dresden. A Missa of Kyrie and Gloria was a complete work in its own genre, the Lutheran Mass that Leipzig used on feast days; the Dresden court was Catholic. Whether the Missa was performed there is not documented, and a Leipzig performance is likely but undocumented too.
The autograph score carries no title for the whole. Bach headed its four fascicles separately: Missa, the Kyrie and Gloria; Symbolum Nicenum, the Credo; Sanctus; and Osanna, Benedictus, Agnus Dei et Dona nobis pacem. The name “Mass in B minor” is the nineteenth century’s; in the catalogue of C. P. E. Bach’s estate it is the great Catholic Mass. There are twenty-seven numbers and twenty-six distinct movements; seventeen are choruses, nine of them in five voices. D major holds thirteen of the twenty-seven, the three trumpets and timpani play in eleven, every one in D, and one number, the Agnus Dei, sits on the flat side, in G minor. The whole runs about 100 to 125 minutes. Only its first movement is in B minor, and its last is in D.
Movement II
The Gloria in excelsis Deo breaks in in D major, 3/8, with trumpets and drums; the Et in terra pax follows in 4/4. From here the Gloria is laid out on the Dresden plan, the number Mass of Zelenka, Lotti and the Neapolitans, in which each clause of the text has its own chorus, aria or duet. The Laudamus te is a soprano with solo violin; the Domine Deus a duet with flute and muted strings. The Qui tollis peccata mundi turns to B minor, four voices with two flutes over a bass that halts under “miserere nobis”
“have mercy on us”. The Qui sedes is an alto with oboe d’amore; the Quoniam a bass with a corno da caccia and two bassoons, a scoring with no parallel in Bach; and the Cum Sancto Spiritu brings back the trumpets and D major.
Between the Et in terra pax and the Laudamus te stands the Gratias agimus tibi: D major, alla breve, four voices in the stile antico, entering one after another, the trumpets added last over the old counterpoint. Its music is the opening chorus of the cantata Wir danken dir, Gott, BWV 29, of 1731, refitted to the Latin: “Gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam”
“We give thee thanks for thy great glory.” This is parody, Bach’s lifelong practice of giving finished music new words, and in this work it is a method. Eight distinct movements of the Mass have identified earlier models, from 1714 to 1735; the Qui tollis is the first chorus of BWV 46, of 1723, transposed. The Latin often fits the music more closely than the German did.
The Gratias is to be remembered. Nothing in the Missa says so; the work will say so ninety minutes later. In 1745 the reuse ran the other way, and the Gloria, the Domine Deus and the Cum Sancto Spiritu became the Latin Christmas cantata Gloria in excelsis Deo, BWV 191. The Missa of 1733 was a self-sufficient work, and for fifteen years it stayed one. The Gloria’s plan is Dresden’s, and its arias are required by the text’s clauses, each of which must have its number, more than by any argument of Bach’s own. That is the frame he inherited; what he did inside it, and after it, is the work.
Movement III
The Credo in unum Deum takes the Gregorian intonation of the Creed as the subject of a fugue: five voices and two violins, seven real parts, alla breve, in A with the mixolydian seventh, over a bass walking in steady crotchets. The Church’s old voice is carried inside the new. Then the Patrem omnipotentem, D major with trumpets, from the cantata BWV 171 of about 1729. Then the Et in unum Dominum, a duet for soprano and alto with two oboes d’amore, in G major, whose two voices open in canon one beat apart on the same notes: “Et in unum Dominum”
“And in one Lord”. In its earlier form the duet set the words of the Incarnation as well. Bach cut them from it and wrote a separate chorus.
That chorus is the Et incarnatus est: B minor, 3/4, five voices with violins in unison, newly composed about 1749 and inserted into the Credo. The Crucifixus follows, in E minor, 3/2, four voices with two flutes and strings, over a ground bass that falls the chromatic fourth from E to B, five semitone steps, repeated statement after statement. The music is the first chorus of Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, BWV 12, of 1714, the earliest in the Mass. At the last statement the ground turns to G major and the voices sink almost to silence: “passus et sepultus est”
“suffered and was buried”. The Et resurrexit breaks in on the silence in D major with trumpets; its model is not known. A bass sings alone at “Et iterum venturus est cum gloria”
“And he shall come again with glory”.
The Symbolum Nicenum has nine movements in five groups: two choruses, a duet, three choruses, an aria, two choruses. Each outer pair sets a chant-bearing chorus in the stile antico beside a D major trumpet chorus that is a parody: the Credo and the Patrem at one end, the Confiteor and the Et expecto at the other. The Crucifixus is the fifth of nine, the centre, with the Incarnation before it and the Resurrection after. Before Bach inserted the Et incarnatus, the Symbolum had eight movements and the Crucifixus was not its centre. The symmetry was made, late, by the insertion, and it carries the Creed’s own argument: that the centre of belief is a death. The one aria, the Et in Spiritum Sanctum, a bass with two oboes d’amore in the galant manner, stands between the centre and the frame.
Movement IV
The Confiteor is for five voices and continuo alone, in F sharp minor, alla breve, newly composed in 1748–49. The Gregorian chant “Confiteor unum baptisma”
“I confess one baptism” runs through it in canon between voices and in long notes under free counterpoint. Then, at “Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum”
“And I await the resurrection of the dead”, the music halts. An Adagio loses its key, moving by enharmonic steps, while the one word “mortuorum” is repeated. Only after that does the Vivace e Allegro affirm the resurrection in D major with trumpets, to music from the cantata BWV 120 of about 1729. The waiting is made real before the hope. The Creed’s confidence becomes a thing won through dread, and the setting says what the text does not.
The Sanctus is the oldest part of the whole: Bach composed it for Christmas Day 1724 in Leipzig and performed it then, and it was heard again in his lifetime. Six voices, with three trumpets, timpani and three oboes, swing in triplets in D major over the whole orchestra on the words of Isaiah’s vision, and the Pleni sunt coeli runs on from it as a fugue in 3/8: “Pleni sunt coeli et terra”
“Heaven and earth are full”. The Osanna in excelsis is for double choir, eight voices; its music was a homage to the Elector, the opening chorus of BWV 215 of 1734. The Benedictus is a tenor in B minor with an obbligato line for which the autograph names no instrument; modern consensus gives it to a flute. Then the Osanna returns in full, because the liturgy says so.
The hand in the Credo fascicle is failing. The dating of the Symbolum Nicenum, the last fascicle and the assembly of the whole rests on paper and handwriting, and places them between 1748 and 1749. Bach’s eyes were operated on by John Taylor in March and April 1750, and he died on 28 July 1750. No complete performance of the work in his lifetime is documented, and no occasion for one is known; hypotheses have been offered, Dresden’s new Catholic court church among them, and they remain hypotheses. The autograph, now in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, was written in an iron-gall ink that has eaten into its paper, and it has been conserved. A dying man spent his last working years on a score with no title, no occasion and no first performance.
Movement V
The Agnus Dei is an alto with violins in unison, in G minor, reworked from the cantata BWV 11 of 1735. It is the one number on the flat side of the work, the furthest point from D major, and from it the last movement returns. The Dona nobis pacem is in D major, alla breve, four voices with trumpets, and it is the Gratias agimus tibi, note for note in its substance, with new words: “Dona nobis pacem”
“Grant us peace.” The Mass ends where its thanksgiving began. The petition is not followed by its answer; it is answered by being made identical with thanksgiving. No liturgy states that thanks and peace are one act. This music does, and only a work that has already sung the Gratias can say it.
What the whole holds can now be counted. Five numbers are in the stile antico, two of them carrying Gregorian chant; the rest are in the concertante idiom of the 1720s to 1740s, up to the galant manner of the Laudamus te and the Et in Spiritum; between them stand a Venetian double choir and a chant used as a fugue subject. The music spans thirty-five years, 1714 to 1749. It has been argued, in the critical edition of 1954, that the four fascicles are four separate works, and the autograph is the answer. One hand assembled them in the last two years of a life, revised a duet to make room for a chorus that gives the Credo a centre, and gave the last movement the music of the seventh. Those are the acts of someone making one object.
The Credo was performed in Hamburg in 1786, under C. P. E. Bach. Nägeli of Zurich announced the publication of the whole in 1818, and Beethoven asked his publisher for a copy more than once. The Kyrie and Gloria were published in 1833 and the rest in 1845. The first complete performance is usually given as 1859, 110 years after the score was assembled. Since then the work has not been out of performance; it became the test piece of the choral society and then of the early-music movement, whose dispute over Bach’s forces was fought on the Dresden parts of 1733, and Joshua Rifkin recorded it with one singer to each part in 1982. A work written for no one has been heard by everyone, and its last word is peace.
Act III · The Twelve
Length is not charged. The subtractive test meets its hardest resistance in the Symbolum Nicenum: remove the Et incarnatus and the Crucifixus is no longer the centre of nine; the Gratias and the Dona nobis require each other across ninety minutes. The give is documented, not supposed. The Missa of 1733 stood alone as a complete Lutheran Mass, the Sanctus stood alone from 1724, and C. P. E. Bach gave the Credo by itself in 1786. The Gloria’s clauses each have a number because the Dresden plan says so, the Osanna returns because the liturgy says so, and eight movements were first compelled by other words. The whole is necessary; several of its parts were not necessary to it.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: belief is confessed through the fear of death, not around it, and thanks and peace are one act. “Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum”
“And I await the resurrection of the dead” is first an Adagio that loses its key while “mortuorum” is repeated, and only then a Vivace in D major with trumpets. The Crucifixus ends almost silent, in G major, at “passus et sepultus est”
“suffered and was buried”. The Dona nobis pacem is sung to the Gratias’s music: the petition is answered by being made identical with thanksgiving. These hold without the faith. Held down because the text is doctrine, not a human situation; no person stands in it as Peter stands in the Passion.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Height stands at the ceiling, and the frequency is the highest the desk has read. The first Kyrie opens with a four-bar cry in five voices before the fugue begins. The Gloria’s 3/8 with trumpets is grandeur; the Gratias rises by accumulation until the trumpets enter; the Qui tollis is beauty under grief. The Credo’s chant over a walking bass is cold elevation; the Crucifixus sinks and turns to G major, and the Et resurrexit erupts; the Confiteor’s Adagio is dread. The Sanctus is six voices in triplets over the whole orchestra, and the last half-hour rises four times. Off the top: the Laudamus te, the Quoniam and the Et in Spiritum are splendour and charm, and the Osanna’s return is the same height twice.
Score: 9.7 / 10
Myth built, not cited. The archetype is descent, death and rising, and the Symbolum Nicenum is built as a cross: the Crucifixus at the centre of nine movements, the Incarnation before it and the Resurrection after, framed by two pairs that each set chant in the stile antico beside D major with trumpets. The centre was made late, by inserting the Et incarnatus. The Crucifixus stands on the oldest figure of lament, the falling chromatic fourth, repeated as a ground: archetype as structure. The Confiteor carries the Gregorian “Confiteor unum baptisma”
“I confess one baptism” inside five voices. Held below the Passion because the Mass has no particulars to keep: no Judas, no cock, no thirty pieces. The myth’s content is the Creed’s.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The inheritance is threefold: the Lutheran Missa of Kyrie and Gloria; the Dresden number Mass, a chorus or aria for each clause; and the stile antico. The departures: a Lutheran cantor’s complete Catholic Ordinary, which no liturgy of either confession could hold; a scale near two hours that no service could use; the composer’s own past assembled by parody into a summa; a Mass that ends with the music of its thanksgiving. The stake was a dying man’s last labour on a work for no one, which waited a century for a hearing. Held below the top because every element was proven: the plan is Dresden’s, parody was lifelong practice, and the turn is in the conception, not in any idiom.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Change the form and the work loses what it knows: that one confession can hold every manner of saying it, chant, Palestrina’s style, the double choir, the Dresden aria, the galant duet, and that the Ordinary from “Kyrie” to “pacem” is one span. Set it in one style and the knowledge goes. Break it into its four fascicles and the Gratias loses its answer and the Agnus Dei’s G minor the D major it falls away from. Parody here is form, not economy: the Dona nobis can be the Gratias again only in a work that has already sung the Gratias. Held below the top because the Gloria’s numbers are Dresden’s container, the Osanna’s return is the rubric’s, and the Benedictus’s obbligato is left without an instrument.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Evidence, not promise, and two centuries of it: Nägeli’s announcement of 1818, Spitta’s biography (1873–80) and Schweitzer (1905); Smend’s edition of 1954 and his thesis that the four fascicles are four works, answered on the chronology by Dadelsen and Dürr; Rifkin’s case for one voice to a part (1981–82); Butt’s handbook (1991) and Stauffer’s monograph (1997); the revised edition of 2010, after another hand was found in the autograph’s corrections. The work’s own questions stay open: why it was written and for whom; whether it is one work; which instrument plays the Benedictus. Performance runs from one voice a part to choirs of hundreds. A score with no title, no occasion and no first performance has kept yielding because of those absences as much as despite them.
Score: 9.7 / 10
The Mass made the Ordinary a form for the whole of a composer’s art rather than for a service: the first great Mass that is a work of art before it is liturgy, and the concert Mass descends from it. Nothing followed in its own time, since it was not heard; a century’s delay is credited and discounted, and much of the reach is Bach’s as a whole. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Credo in Hamburg in 1786; Beethoven’s requests for a copy, and the Missa solemnis in its line; publication in 1833 and 1845; a first complete performance in 1859; the Bach Choir in London, founded to give it; and the early-music movement’s dispute over forces, fought over this score above all.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Survival is demonstrated. The autograph survived its own ink, the Dresden parts survived, and since 1859 the work has been performed without interruption, by churches of both confessions and by halls that belong to neither. The surface fixed to its moment is close to nil: a Latin Ordinary belongs to no decade, and unlike the Ninth the work has not been worn by civic use. It has outlived the confession that produced it, the Leipzig that had no use for it and the Dresden that may never have heard it. The cost is the gap: from its assembly in 1749 to 1859 the whole was performed nowhere. Parts were heard and the manuscript was sought, but it survived on paper longer than the Passion did.
Score: 9.4 / 10
The making bears weight throughout: five-voice counterpoint from the first Kyrie’s fugue to the Et expecto; the stile antico as a living style in the second Kyrie, the Gratias and the Confiteor, where the chant runs in canon and in long notes; the Credo’s seven real parts over a bass in steady crotchets; six and eight real voices in the Sanctus and the Osanna; scoring without parallel, a horn and two bassoons under a bass voice; the Confiteor’s enharmonic Adagio; and parody that refits German cantata music to Latin so that the fit is often closer the second time. The costs are specific: the Benedictus’s obbligato has no named instrument, the Credo fascicle carries a failing hand and corrections in another’s, and a few parodies show the seam.
Score: 9.7 / 10
The two most distant elements are the Confiteor, five voices over a Gregorian chant in a style two centuries old, and the Laudamus te, a soprano with solo violin in the newest Dresden manner. One law governs them. By key: D major with trumpets is the key of glory, and eleven choruses of praise and affirmation stand in it; B minor is the key of petition; the one flat key, the Agnus Dei’s G minor, is the furthest point, from which the Dona nobis returns. By synthesis: every style is admitted on one condition, that it serve its clause, so brilliance and austerity are the same obedience. The strain: the range is wide enough that the ear can hear an anthology, and the law holds by key and text more than by shared material.
Score: 9.4 / 10
The Ordinary gives fewer orders than a Gospel does, and the setting holds what it is given in one architecture: the sacred throughout; the cosmos, “factorem coeli et terrae, visibilium omnium et invisibilium”
“maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible”; history and the state, “sub Pontio Pilato”
“under Pontius Pilate”; the human community, “hominibus bonae voluntatis”
“to men of good will”; the body and death, in the Incarnation and the burial; consciousness, in the single voices of the Qui sedes, the Benedictus and the Agnus Dei; peace, as the last word. What holds the axis here is absence: the family, with the Virgin named once; labour; and any particular human life.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime, The Bottomless Well and The Made at 9.7, then The Living Form at 9.5. Elevation that returns from the first Kyrie’s four bars to the Dona nobis, two centuries of editing, analysis and performance still unsettled, a making that is the subject of the work, and a form in which the synthesis of every manner is the knowledge.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.6: the Missa of 1733 and the Sanctus of 1724 had complete lives of their own, the Credo was given alone in 1786, the Gloria’s numbers follow the Dresden plan, the Osanna returns because the liturgy says so, and eight movements were first compelled by other words. Below the rest, The Encompassed at 8.7, which is the Ordinary’s reach: the family, labour and any particular human life are absent.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.7, The Living Form at 9.5, The Inner Law at 9.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.4, The Archetypal Deep at 9.2 and Pressure on Tradition at 9.2 clear the bar of 8.5 with room, The Swerve at 8.9 clears it by four tenths, and The Unconcealment at 8.8 by three. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.6, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.7. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · the score of the Mass in B minor, BWV 232, as assembled in Bach’s autograph of 1748–49, the standard performing text, and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, edition, libretto or recording was in hand, and the running time is a range across modern performance, not a measurement. Four parts and twenty-seven numbers, twenty-six distinct movements, are scored as one work; the Missa of 1733 and the Sanctus of 1724, each a complete work in its own right, are used only as evidence, and no single performance is the object. The words are the Latin Ordinary of the Mass, a fixed text, with the Kyrie’s Greek, and are quoted sparingly; every English gloss is the desk’s own, plain and literal, and none is taken from a published translation. The dating of the assembly rests on paper and handwriting; no complete performance in Bach’s lifetime is documented, and the first complete performance is given as 1859 on the usual account. Figures that could not be verified, among them bar counts, the number of statements of the Crucifixus ground, the order of the Confiteor’s chant entries, the number and copyists of the Dresden parts and the dates of the Sanctus’s later performances, are not given. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.