Lutheran Mass in F 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.
The Kyrie of the Mass in F Major is in stile antico with the three sections fashioned as points of imitation. The basses provide a cantus firmus-like foundation based on the chorale “Christe, du Lamm Gottes” while the horns and oboes intone the melody of the hymn above the vocal ensemble. A mood of unbridled celebration is created by the vigorous gigue rhythm and dense polyphonic texture employed in the Gloria. In “Domine Deus,” the wide ranging melody of the bass is delicately ornamented by the violins. The soprano aria “Qui Tollis” employs an even more sparse texture with the plaintive affect in this case created by the sequenced descending motives of the obbligato oboe. A return to the triple meter of the “Domine Deus” and the obbligato violin mark the “Quoniam,” although the spare texture of the “Qui Tollis” continues. The jubilant “Cum Sancto Spiritu” returns the mood to that created in the Gloria adding the two horns to the dense polyphony, although this time in a quick duple meter.
