Programme Notes

W. A. Mozart, Laudate Dominum

Mozart's two settings of the Vespers date from 1779 and 1780, during the brief period when he served as court organist to the Archbishop of Salzburg. The Vesperae de Dominica is the earlier of the two and the one less frequently heard. Each work consists of five psalm settings followed by a magnificat. Because these movements could be separated by portions of the service, they are pieces that can stand alone, if needed.

Stylistically Mozart mixes learned counterpoint in the "old church style" (stile antico) with a more modern homophonic and melodic style. In both works, that contrast is most striking at the moment when he shifts from the severe counterpoint of the Laudate pueri to the Laudate Dominum which follows. In the Vesperae solennes de confessore, the first of these two movements begins with a fugue on a subject that Mozart used again years later in his Requiem. That is then followed by the famous, sublimely beautiful Laudate Dominum for soprano and chorus, a piece that was so popular in the nineteenth century that it suffered all kinds of popular arrangements for different combinations of instruments, much like the Pachelbel Canon in our time. Mozart evidently thought well enough of both of his Vespers settings that, after he moved to Vienna, he asked his father to send copies of them, so that he could show them to Baron van Swieten. Van Swieten, who was then introducing Mozart to contrapuntal works of Bach and Handel, would no doubt have appreciated seeing the sections written in the old style.

W. A. Mozart, Piano Sonata

No. 10 in C Major

By early 1777, Mozart had grown discontent with his position under Archbishop Colloredo in Salzburg. Not only had the composer become disenchanted by a lacklustre Salzburg orchestra and opera, but tensions in his relationship with the Archbishop grew, not least due to Mozart's low salary. After much back-and-forth with the Archbishop, Mozart was granted an extended leave of absence. He decided to visit Paris, with stops in Munich, Augsburg and Mannheim.

This sonata is one of a group of four (K.330 – 333) that were originally thought to have been composed in 1778 during Mozart's stay in Paris, but are now known to date between 1781 and 1784 after Mozart had broken with the Archbishop of Salzburg altogether and moved permanently to Vienna. This move, in 1781, was much against the wishes of his father, as was his marriage the following year to Constanza Weber.

The liberating effect of these assertive actions may have provided the emotional base for a remarkable outpouring of confident works of mature genius: the six string quartets that he dedicated to Haydn, the Haffner Symphony, numerous piano sonatas and concertos and the opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail. His fame leapt.

The early 1780s were not only a time of great change in Mozart's personal and musical fortunes, they also saw the arrival of substantially improved fortepiano instruments which had been developing in competition with the harpsichord and clavichord over the previous half century. The sonata demonstrates an apparently easy mastery of classical form, structurally simple and beguiling innocent. It is a masterpiece, in which every note belongs—one of the most loveable works Mozart ever wrote. However, one of its most poignant moments – the last four bars of the second movement – is apparently an afterthought, missing from the original manuscript, but present in the first edition.

F. J. Haydn, Stabat Mater

Haydn occupies a pivotal place in the history of Western music. In 1732, the year he was born, Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi, composers whose music defined the High Baroque style, were still in their primes. By the time Haydn died seventy-seven years later, Beethoven was already in his so-called middle period and hard at work ushering in the age of Romanticism. Haydn’s lifetime thus neatly encompassed the Classical era, and his music reflects the “classical” virtues of equilibrium, clarity, and seriousness of purpose that we associate with the Enlightenment. His influence was felt far and wide, even though he spent virtually his entire career either in Vienna or in the idyllic seclusion of Prince Nicolaus Esterházy’s country estates in present-day Hungary, where he served as resident Kapellmeister. After that productive sinecure, so conducive to sustained creativity, came to a close in 1790, Haydn embarked on two extended sojourns to London, where he wrote a clutch of popular symphonies that made him the toast of Europe. In 1795 Prince Nicolaus II enticed the aging composer back to end his days in the Austrian capital. This late period yielded many of Haydn’s finest works, including the oratorios The Creation and The Seasons and no fewer than six settings of the Roman Catholic mass. Haydn occupies a pivotal place in the history of Western music. In 1732, the year he was born, Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi, composers whose music defined the High Baroque style, were still in their primes. By the time Haydn died seventy-seven years later, Beethoven was already in his so-called middle period and hard at work ushering in the age of Romanticism. Haydn’s lifetime thus neatly encompassed the Classical era, and his music reflects the “classical” virtues of equilibrium, clarity, and seriousness of purpose that we associate with the Enlightenment. His influence was felt far and wide, even though he spent virtually his entire career either in Vienna or in the idyllic seclusion of Prince Nicolaus Esterházy’s country estates in present-day Hungary, where he served as resident Kapellmeister. After that productive sinecure, so conducive to sustained creativity, came to a close in 1790, Haydn embarked on two extended sojourns to London, where he wrote a clutch of popular symphonies that made him the toast of Europe. In 1795 Prince Nicolaus II enticed the aging composer back to end his days in the Austrian capital. This late period yielded many of Haydn’s finest works, including the oratorios The Creation and The Seasons and no fewer than six settings of the Roman Catholic mass. Little is known about what prompted the thirty-five year old composer to choose this medieval Marian hymn for the text of his oratorio in 1767. Indeed, his duties at the Esterházy court had only recently been expanded to include church music. Prior to his promotion to the position of Kapellmeister in 1766, he had been responsible mainly for writing symphonies and other instrumental music; the sacred-music portfolio was still in the hands of one Gregor Joseph Werner, who had held the top post for nearly four decades. Haydn was characteristically modest about his work, telling Count Esterházy that he had “translated” the Stabat Mater “into music according to the best of my powers.” Yet both the Passion theme and the ambitious scale of the hour-long oratorio suggest that the new Kapellmeister intended to make a splash.

If so, he succeeded in spades: after the work’s premiere—which likely took place on Good Friday 1767 in the Esterházys’ private chapel at Eisenstadt—he sent the score of the Stabat Mater to Johann Adolph Hasse, a renowned composer at the Habsburg court in Vienna. Hasse was suitably impressed and arranged for the oratorio to be heard in the imperial capital. Further performances soon followed, many of them in nonliturgical concert settings, and by the turn of the century the Stabat Mater had become the most frequently performed of all Haydn’s works. But Haydn was riding the wave of the future: the dramatic elements in works like the Stabat Mater and the Schöpfungsmesse (Creation Mass) anticipate the quasi-operatic masses of Berlioz, Verdi, and other Romantic composers. A leading German music magazine hailed it as a “masterpiece . . . with deeply moving beauty and highly appropriate expressivity, and the only one that could hold its ground next to Pergolesi’s.”

First performed in 1736, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater was one of the most celebrated and widely disseminated works of the eighteenth century. Haydn must have known it well; indeed, he almost certainly sang it as a boy chorister at the Hofkapelle in Vienna. Like Haydn, Pergolesi was an experienced opera composer, and their respective treatments of the Passion story are richly stocked with drama as well as melody. Haydn, however, worked on a significantly grander scale than the Italian. Pergolesi’s chamber oratorio unfolds in a series of twelve solos and duets for two high voices, accompanied by a small string ensemble. Haydn, in contrast, called for a four-part choir, four soloists, and an orchestra. No fewer than sixty musicians took part in the first known public performance of the Stabat Mater, which Haydn conducted from the keyboard in Vienna in 1771. In 1803, taking advantage of the resident orchestra that the Esterházy prince had placed at his disposal in Eisenstadt. The presence of such “worldly” instruments in the church was controversial, and Haydn was sharply criticised for mixing sacred and secular idioms; Antonio Salieri, the powerful imperial Kapellmeister, dismissed his late masses as a stylistic “mishmash.” But Haydn was riding the wave of the future: the dramatic elements in works like the Stabat Mater and the Schöpfungsmesse (Creation Mass) anticipate the quasi-operatic masses of Berlioz, Verdi, and other Romantic composers.

To be sure, few stories are more inherently dramatic than that of Mary’s sorrowful vigil at the foot of the cross. Taken together, the backstory of Christ’s sacrificial death and the sequel of humankind’s promised redemption conspire to focus our attention on the emotional drama of the Virgin’s anguish. Her suffering, like her son’s, is at once personal and universal: “Fac me cruce custodiri / morte Christi praemunire” (May the cross become my shield / through Christ’s death may I be healed), the tenor soloist sings in gently insistent trochees, bearing witness for all humanity. Taking his cue from the Latin text, Haydn strikes a judicious balance between present grief and hopeful expectation, with the oratorio’s fourteen movements more or less evenly split between minor and major keys. The sequence of choruses, solo arias, and ensembles reflects the composer’s keen sense of musical and dramatic pacing, as do his varied instrumental accompaniments: only at the beginning and end of the oratorio does he deploy the orchestra in its full splendour.

Much of the vocal writing has a distinctly operatic character, complete with improvised cadenzas, in keepingwith Prince Nicolaus’s growing appetite for the art form. Elsewhere Haydn emulates the finely nuanced introspection and expressive range of the so-called empfindsamer Stil (sensitive style) associated with contemporary composers like Hasse and C.P.E. Bach.

Throughout the Stabat Mater, Haydn uses sudden dynamic contrasts and vivid text-painting to accentuate the drama of Christ’s Passion. Both devices feature prominently in the opening tenor solo, “Stabat Mater dolorosa”; listen, for example, for the syncopated palpitations in the orchestra as Mary’s soul is figuratively pierced by the sword of grief. In the lightly tripping alto solo “O quam tristis et afflicta,” a chromatically ascending phrase in the vocal line—the first of many such upwardly mobile melodic lines in the oratorio—subtly reminds us of the resiliency of faith. The two ensuing movements express compassion for Mary in contrasting registers: a majestic choral fugue in minor mode (“Quis est homo qui non fleret”) and a tender major-key arioso for solo soprano (“Quis non posset contristari”). The mood changes abruptly in the snarling bass solo “Pro peccatis sua gentis,” depicting the lash strokes of Christ’s tormentors. A tenderly consolatory tenor aria (“Vidit suum dulcem natum”) gives way to three movements—the chorus “Eja Mater, fons amoris” the soprano-tenor duet “Sancta Mater, istud agas,” and the alto solo “Fac me vere tecum flere”—in which the first-person hymnist begs to partake of Mary’s love and Christ’s suffering. Soloists and chorus sing a fugal paean to the Virgin (“Virgo virginum praeclara”), followed by a vision of Judgment Day in the tempestuous bass solo “Flammis orci ne succendar.” Lively “snap” rhythms characterise the tenor’s plea to be shielded by the cross in “Fac me cruce custodiri.” Death stalks the descending chromatic melody in “Quando corpus morietur,” but the hymnist’s thoughts quickly turn to the glory of paradise (“Paradisi gloria”), the subject of the sparkling choral fugue that brings Haydn’s masterpiece to a close.