If you follow the music scene at all, you’ve surely noticed that nearly every ensemble, large and small, here and abroad, has performed music of Mozart recently. All this activity is tied to the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. I, too, found this Mozart year an irresistible occasion for celebrating his genius, and when an opportunity arose to collaborate with the Mission Chamber Orchestra based in Santa Clara, I jumped at the chance to perform one of my favorites from the entire choral repertoire, Mozart’s Mass in C minor. A huge personal thank-you goes to the orchestra’s director, Emily Ray, for her help in bringing this great music to life.

In the last decade of Mozart’s life, there was little call to produce sacred music, and he wrote only two motets, a mass, and a requiem. Both of the large-scale works were left unfinished. In the case of the Requiem, this was, of course, due to the composer’s death. Several years earlier, Mozart worked on and then abandoned the Mass in C minor, leaving it with no second half of the Credo, sketchy orchestration in the Sanctus and Benedictus, and no Agnus Dei at all.

Written just after his marriage at age 26 to the 20-year-old Constanze Weber and not written for any commission, the mass seems to have been designed partly as a wedding present and partly to appease his family, who were unhappy with Wolfgang’s choice of a bride. Constanze was the soprano soloist when the extant movements of the mass were performed at the small church of St. Peter in Salzburg. By all accounts, her voice was weak and shaking, and Mozart’s father and sister remained unconvinced that the composer had chosen his mate wisely.

The work is an interesting hybrid. Mozart had recently been studying the fugues of Bach and Handel. His interest in the styles of the late Baroque is apparent in the choral movements, such as his use of double chorus for the “Qui tollis” and “Sanctus” and the still more unusual 5-part chorus of the “Gratias” and the opening movement of the Credo. There are also two amazing fugues as grand finales: the “Cum Sancto Spiritu” and the “Hosanna.” On the other hand, the arias are in the virtuosic style of Mozart’s Italian operas. The soprano’s “Et incarnatus” with its delightful woodwind trio is especially sublime.

The prevailing theory for why the mass remained unfinished is that the composer lost interest once he had met the formal challenges of writing in the earlier styles. Had he completed it, Mozart’s Mass in C minor would have been as long as Bach’s Mass in B minor, and even in the form that Mozart left it, the work is regarded as one of the three greatest settings of the mass, along with Bach’s great masterwork and Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis.

In looking for a work to complement the Mozart, I immediately thought of the Te Deum (1986) of Arvo Pärt, a captivating work that has been on my to-be-performed list since I first heard the work on the radio in 1993.
Pärt’s story begins in 1935 when he was born in Paide, Estonia, then part of the Soviet Union. After graduation from Tallinn Conservatory, he composed in traditional styles with some success. Despite having little exposure to the currents of Western music, he did try serial techniques in the 1960s but soon tired of them. When some of his works were banned, he went into the first of several self-imposed silences and studied the choral music of the Franco-Flemish Renaissance. Afterward, he wrote music in the spirit of Renaissance polyphony for a time but again went into self-imposed silence.

He re-emerged in 1976 after a transformation so radical as to make his previous music almost unrecognizable as that of the same composer. He invented, or discovered, a technique to which he has remained loyal and about which he has written, “I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note—or a silent beat or a moment of silence—comforts me. I work with very few elements, with one voice, two voices. I build with primitive materials, with the triad, with one specific tonality. The three notes of a triad are like bells and that is why I call it tintinnabulation.” With this basic technique, Pärt is able to spin out entire works of amazing beauty that cast an ethereal spell over the listener.

In a typical choral passage from the Te Deum, two voices sing a line of the text together. One part sounds only notes from the D minor and D major triads that are the basis of the whole piece. The arpeggios in that part can be wild at times, providing quite a challenge to the singers. The other of the two parts is a chant-like melody that repeatedly homes in on one pitch from the triad.

In four- or six-part choral passages, the altos and basses have chants that mirror each other, one melody going up whenever the other goes down, while the sopranos’ and tenors’ arpeggios surround those melodies in a shimmering halo.

The string orchestra has two roles. Interludes between choral sections are constructed with mirrored melodies and accompanying arpeggios, much like the choral passages, but the orchestral melodies are more lyrical than the choral chants, and the arpeggios are in contrastingly vigorous rhythms. At other times, the strings simply support the chorus with sustained drones on one or more notes of the triad.

Besides the chorus and strings, the score calls for prepared piano and wind harp. The preparation of the piano is to insert steel bolts between the strings for particular notes in order to create a raw, metallic tone. The wind harp, so called because it is the wind that activates its strings, originated in ancient Greece and is strictly an outdoor instrument. For practical performances, the publisher of the music provides a recording of a wind harp to contribute an eerie drone to the timbre of the ensemble.

I find the contrasting styles of Mozart’s Mass in C minor and Pärt’s Te Deum quite exciting. As you listen to tonight’s concert, I hope that you, too, will enjoy how the pairing of these wonderful pieces helps you to appreciate both more deeply.

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