E.T.A Hoffman, in his essay Old and New Church Music, written in 1814, states “the church music of Haydn and Mozart is contaminated by excessive sweetness, which banned all seriousness, reverence and dignity.” (Incidentally, he also said that performances of Viennese masses had no place in the concert hall, drawing a comparison to the reading of a sermon in a theatre.) The roots of Mozart’s sacred word setting can be traced back to his undoubted skill and experience as a composer of Italian and German comic opera. In his masses we find places where sections with almost absurd and theatrically extended coloratura phrases sit side by side with petitional movements which seem to be filled with a sense of grief and loss rather than of supplication, awe and sacred wonderment. There are Credos where textual passages of the most intrinsic expression of Christian belief and doctrine are illustrated with jaunty scalic and sequential passages, dramatic outbursts, sections of amiable jocular gaiety, and extended, almost symphonic, fugal coda passages to set the Amen. Reinhard Pauly, in his book Music in the Classic Style, accepts the fact that classical church music was generally too “happy”, but defends it on the grounds that it is an expression of the religious outlook of the time. The eighteenth-century view was that music and religious art, in the form of painting and architecture, were there to provide a frame – a beautiful setting for the divine ceremony – and the beauty of the house of God, and the art and music which filled it, was to be no more than an artistic outpouring of praise and thankfulness.  

Lovers of classical music will find much to enjoy in this evening’s concert. Present in the Vespers are all the comforting elements of the classical musical language: regular phrase lengths, carefully presented structures, graceful ornamentation, beautifully balanced melodies, the harmonic dependence on the ever-present relationship between tonic and dominant, subtle modulations and well-textured orchestration. With regard to the effectiveness of the setting of the text as a vehicle for religious worship, it is up to the individual to decide whether or not they find it satisfactory.

The Office Of Vespers

Vespers is the seventh of the Canonical Hours, or Divine Offices, and is a service of evening prayer held at sunset in the Orthodox, Western Catholic and Eastern churches. The Anglican equivalent is Evensong. It is a mixture of psalms, hymns and a canticle from the New Testament. The psalms and canticle (usually the Magnificat) were traditionally framed by seasonal antiphons sung to ancient plainsong, the text of which is often a short extract from the text of the forthcoming item. These musical items were separated by bible readings and responsories and sometimes by instrumental items. Mozart wrote eighteen Church, or Epistle, Sonatas for this purpose. The psalms and canticles are concluded with a doxology – the Gloria Patri. This setting of the Vespers (K339) was written in 1780 for use in Salzburg Cathedral, of which Mozart was organist at the time. The music is exuberant, full of youthful energy, and demonstrates perfectly some of the reasons for the reservations of musicologists such as E.T.A. Hoffman and Charles Rosen when discussing sacred music of this era. There is a certain naivety in the setting of the text, most of which is dispensed with as quickly as possible, in short phrases, and with hardly any textual repetition, reiteration or illustration of the sort found throughout the weightier works of composers such as Bach, Handel and Monteverdi.