Lutheran Mass in A major
While earlier musicologists dismissed the four Latin Lutheran masses contained in the 1739 manuscript because most of the music stems from earlier cantatas, modern scholars are beginning to see the work in the light of the remarkable process of revision and reuse in which Bach engaged nearly continually throughout his career. As Christolph Wolffe notes: “The transposition of German cantata movements into mass settings did more than replace German words, contingent on the time and occasion of their writing, with the timelessness of the Latin (and Greek) texts; it also removed the limitations imposed on the cantatas by their place in the annual church cycle and gave them a more general validity.” The works parodied for the individual movements were composed as early as the Weimar period, in the case of the Kyrie of the Mass in A Major. The works share a connection to the Mass in B minor, in that this widely acknowledged sacred masterpiece also contains many parodied sections. The Mass in B minor also began its life as a Missa brevis, first composed as only two movements, a Kryie and Gloria, for King Frederick August II in 1736 in an effort to gain the title of “court composer.” The four Lutheran Missae breves are connected in their six-movement structure, with an opening Kyrie and a five-movement Gloria, in which three central arias are enclosed by two dynamically constructed choruses.
Although the Mass in A Major conforms to the same general six-movement structure of the Mass in F Major, several of the movements have extraordinary features. The consistent homphonic texture of the voices framed by orchestral ritonellos in the first section of the gently lilting Kyrie blends the concertato approach of the baroque with the simplicity of the roccoco style that was to follow close after Bach. The Christe section of this movement can only be described as a recitative for four imitative voices; the imitative approach continues in the closing short Kyrie, although this time closer to the rhythmic approach of the opening of the movement. The Gloria is structured as an alternating conversation between the stile concitato (agitated style) mood of the opening “Gloria in excelsis Deo” and the enclosed meditative statements with obbligato flutes on the more contemplative portions of the text “et in terra pax hominibus” and “adoramus te” recalls a similar structuring of the crowd portions of the St. John Passion. Bach colors the three ensuing arias similar to the Mass in F major with obbligato instruments pairing the bass again with the violin, the soprano with woodwinds, this time the flutes, and the alto with the combined violins and viola. While the soprano and alto arias each are beautiful in their own right, the bass aria “Domine Deus” contains some of the most fluid and lyrical writing for this voice of Bach’s entire career. The closing “Cum Sancto Spiritu” masterfully contrasts and blends the orchestra, soloists, and choir in a clear yet dense polyphony, creating one of the most satisfying closing movements that Bach ever wrote.
