In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

11 Franz Schubert: Mass in G Major, D.167 Still a teenager, Franz (Peter) Schubert in early 1815 already was a sparkling fountainhead of original melody. The wellspring of lyricism from which choral works, string quartets, and an unprecedented ®ow of songs already had bubbled was by now fast becoming a geyser. In time that geyser would prove to be the primal font of German lieder, and its torrent would pour into much of the music of the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in®uencing both the concert halls and the popular tunes of the streets. The teenager was gifted, and the gift was a unique one. Young Schubert wrote every day. A former choirboy at the Habsburg’s Royal Chapel (Hofkapelle) in Vienna, he had both a clear sense of what was felicitous for the voice and a special love for poetry. He read Goethe and Schiller, together with—as the years passed—a wide range of other poets; studying their works often moved him straightway to compose. On any one day he might produce two or three songs, and some days as many as six or eight! Before his nineteenth birthday he had written around 200 lieder.1 These are not “student works,” in any sense of that cliché: Gretchen am Spinnrade, Rastlose Liebe, Heidenröslein, and Erlkönig are among them. At age 18, Franz Schubert was creating vocal literature that is heard today on every recital stage. Perhaps no composer in music history has created as much fully mature music while an adolescent, even the venerated Mozart.2 Two of his brothers played the violin, as did Franz, and his father was a ’cellist . With Franz shifting to viola, they often joined in chamber music, and that started him writing string quartets. In school, he had the luck to participate in what seems to have been a very capable student orchestra, competent to attempt Viennese Classical symphonies; what is more—as what we now would call the ensemble’s concertmaster—young Franz apparently was permitted to conduct on occasion. Salieri was among those who guided his musical studies. Schubert was Viennese, Catholic, a singer, and an orchestral player: it seems natural then that among his earliest major works would be masses for the Austrian churches. In 1812–13 he wrote at least four individual Kyries, before fash1 . At the time of his death, just ten years later, there would be well over 600 of his lieder; exactly how many is a matter for scholarly disputation. 2. An assessment of Mozart’s output will show that little of what he wrote by his eighteenth birthday is performed with any frequency today, with the Exultate, Jubilate, K.165 a notable exception. Quite a number of Schubert’s early songs, by contrast, are heard with great regularity. ioning a whole mass (D.105, in F) late in 1814. Grateful that this ¤rst complete ordinary had been well received the previous autumn, he spent the ¤rst week of March 1815 composing another—the Mass in G Major, D.167—for soprano, tenor, and bass soloists, chorus, string orchestra, and organ. His second symphony (D.125, in Bb) was in progress at the same time, and would be ¤nished late that month. Perhaps the ¤rst impression one gets from the Mass in G Major is its blend of that melodic gift of his with the overall style of the great Viennese Classical masters—the style especially of Haydn, Mozart, and (then 45-year-old) Beethoven.3 In the Hofkapelle Schubert was made familiar with the liturgical music of the time, as well as that of earlier eras. As we have said, in his school orchestra he played and sometimes conducted the instrumental works of his great Austrian predecessors, and from his boyhood he was aware of the new creations coming from Beethoven’s pen. In that context—as in any Viennese Classical work—the directness and clarity of the Mass in G Major are manifest; moreover (in the Benedictus trio, for example) its maturity is surprising. Audiences are invariably responsive to it. Choosing Performance Forces Of the earliest performances of the Handel, Haydn,andBeethoven works in this volume, scholars now know quite a lot, as you have seen—speci¤c dates, places, musical forces, and all. Of the creation of Vivaldi’s Gloria itself we know essentially nothing. Of the Bach Magni¤cat and the Schubert Mass in G Major we know a bit more, and—beyond that—can...

Share