Mass in Music

At the concerts in Bydgoszcz and Gdańsk, the Polish Chamber Choir, conducted by Jan Łukaszewski, together with a quartet of celebrated soloists and the Bydgoszcz Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, will perform two classicist pieces of the musical form known as the mass.

The first of these was written by Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), the eldest of the three Viennese Classics. Ever since he became Chief Kapellmeister at the court of the Esterhazys in 1766, besides writing chamber pieces and operas, he devoted much more of his time to sacred music. When he returned to his patrons from a short stay in Vienna, and later in England, one of his duties was to compose a mass in celebration of each name day of the wife of Prince Nicholas II, Maria Hermenegild. The Lord Nelson Mass (1798), which Haydn himself called “Mass for Troubled Times” (Latin Missa in Angustiis), was the only one he composed in a minor key. It was written for an orchestra consisting of only string instruments, trumpets, kettle drums and organ. Extremely lively, full of sudden unexpected key changes and completely opposing emotions, it perfectly captures the zeitgeist of the time of the Napoleonic Wars. It is usually thought that the majestic marching sound of the trumpets in the Benedictus should be associated with the news of the decisive victory of the British fleet led by Admiral Horatio Nelson over the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile in Egypt, although in fact, the news had reached him and the public only on the day of the new piece’s premiere.

Józef Zeidler (ca. 1744-1806), sometimes called the Polish Mozart, is now considered one of Poland’s most important composers of church music from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. However, until recently, he held a marginal place in the history of Polish music. The Missa ex D  is one of ten composed by Zeidler. It comes from the music manuscripts left by the Parish Ensemble of Grodzisk Wielkopolski and is kept at the Archdiocese Archive in Poznań.

The piece, in the celebratory and solemn key of D-major, is written for solo voices, choir, string instruments, organ and two trumpets (or optionally two horns) is a most finely crafted realisation of the musical form of the mass. Taking stylistic inspiration from the Viennese Classics, the composer also used folk motifs to create his work’s extraordinary character.