Mozart's Church Music Via "Another Route"

Sometimes you think you've lived before 

All that you live today 

Things you do come back to you 

As though they knew the way 

Oh, the tricks your mind can play!

--Lorenz Hart, "Where or When", from Babes in Arms

I could revise this verse slightly: "Sometimes you think you've read before/All that you read today"' especially when I read a chapter from Charles Scribner III's new book Artists & Authors: A Life in Good Company. 

The book as a whole is divided into three parts: Authors ("Books and Company": Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Woolf at Scribner's); Artists ("Old Masters": Bernini, Rubens, Caravaggio, Michelangelo); Singers ("The Vocal Arts": Sacred Music, Schwarzkopf, von Stade, and Costa).

 

[Please note that von Stade is singing "Where or When" in the link above.]

It was in that "Sacred Music" chapter that Scribner wrote about Mozart's sacred (Church) music as Dietrich von Hildebrand had done in his comments in MOZART BEETHOVEN SCHUBERT and in the "Sacred Music" excerpt from Aesthetics, Volume 2. I think that von Hildebrand and Scribner agree on "the quintessentially Catholic character" of Mozart's Church music.

Scribner comments: 

The common wisdom used to be that Mozart's religious music was merely "for hire", something he knocked off to earn a living so that he could write the music--operas, symphonies, chamber pieces--he really loved. What a surprise, then, to read that his widow, Constanze, said that his favorite genre of all was church music. A close study of Mozart's sacred music confirms Constanze's claim. (p. 139)

He goes on to comment on Mozart's Vesperae solennes de confessore, K339 that it "was a carefully composed as anything Mozart ever wrote" with due attention to the "texts of psalms and canticles". He also highlights the "Dona nobis pacem" of the Coronation Mass in C-major that its peace "is not a passive one--not the absence of pain or conflict, but rather the consummation of joy." (p. 140)

[Please note that I purchased Artists & Authors and enjoyed reading Scribner's comments on the authors, artists, and singers he highlights. For one thing, I learned how to describe the Crucifix at my home parish, Blessed Sacrament: as a "Christo Vivo"; His eyes are open and His side has not been pierced!]

After reading those comments, I pulled out my copy of a "Double Decca" set of some of Mozart's sacred music, including Vesperae Solennes De Confessore, K339; Vesperae De Dominica, K321; Litaniae, K243; Litaniae Lauretanae, K195, and the "Spaur-Messe", K258. In Kenneth Chalmers' notes he quotes a letter Mozart sent to Padre Martini in September 1776, in which the twenty-year-old writes about his "current activities in Salzburg" that "My father is in charge of music in the cathedral, and this gives me an opportunity to write as much church music as I like . . ." Mozart further comments on the challenge of the Prince Archbishop's time restrictions (a Mass was not to last more than 45 minutes): "Special care is needed with this sort of composition." Archbishop Colloredo was responding to Pope Benedict XIV's 1749 encyclical "Annus qui" (which was a Jubilee Year) to, according to Chalmers, "focus on clarity, and on an identifiably 'sacred' idiom". (p. 5)

Chalmers does comment that Mozart and the Prince Archbishop Colloredo did not get along ("possibly exacerbated by the very limitations imposed on sacred music" (p. 6) and Mozart did want write more operas but concludes on page 7 that he wanted to present copies of both the confessore and Dominica Vespers to Baron van Sweeten in March of 1783.

Nevertheless, one would have to twist Mozart's words to imply that he didn't want to compose that much Church music!