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10 Franz Joseph Haydn: Missa in angustiis (Nelsonmesse) We turn now from three towering Baroque creations to a parallel representation from the Viennese Classical era. The Haydn, Schubert, and Beethoven masterpieces we are about to examine are just as accessible to choruses and orchestras of standard size and instrumentation. We will address the same elements of historical and biographical interest, together with possible performing forces, and editions appropriate to your use. Again we will move through each movement, giving suggestions about tempo choices, speci¤c bowings, and interpretive decisions. The modest system of technical language we employ can largely be found de¤ned in the glossary, and much of it is discussed in detail, as you know, in Part I of this book. Elements of Viennese Classical Performance Practice It is convenient to base our consideration of Viennese Classical works on the music of the founder of the style, Franz Joseph Haydn. The evolution from Baroque to Classical is marked especially by the disappearance of the basso continuo as the harmonic foundation of the texture. Joseph Haydn played a major role in this development; in his post-choirboy years he earned a part of his livelihood playing serenades outdoors in Vienna, and no doubt found it very inconvenient to haul a keyboard instrument to these engagements. His string quartets—so fundamentally different from the Baroque trio sonata—were his workshop from his youth on, as he turned away from the continuo and ¤gured bass. Church music always tends to be conservative, however, and so we ¤nd even his late masses include organ parts which reinforce—but no longer constitute the whole essence of—the harmonic ®ow through the texture. In the Nelsonmesse the organ reinforces and supports, and it sometimes handles solo responsibilities , but it does not assume the structural importance it has in, say, the Baroque works in earlier chapters. How should this music sound? The Austrian churches for which Haydn’s masses were intended are ¤lled with hard, re®ective surfaces; there is much marble and glass; above all this there are domes which contribute to (in the case of Eisenstadt’s Bergkirche, for example) a 42 to 52–second echo. Rapid passages played legato become unintelligible; in fact, any full nineteenth-century legato turns to cacophony within a single phrase. “Lighter, shorter, listen!” would have to be our watch- words, were we in such settings. In these churches tempos must be a bit slower, and strings of quarter notes must be performed as eighths separated by eighth rests. More than in American concert halls, many of which tend to be acoustically “dry,” connections between notes are provided by reverberation, rather than by legato.1 Articulation, then, has to be a constant matter of concern to us in performing this music. Here we should not permit the full Romantic legato, as we know it now; separation was taken for granted by Haydn’s players—and his singers! Detaché bowing was standard, and the wedge (^) was one of his favorite markings: it denotes separation like a modern staccato, less emphatic than Haydn’s accent (>).2 His staccato was even shorter. “Lighter, shorter” is not intended to make the music sound super¤cial. It is to lend it clarity, and forward impetus. Heavy, muddy performance of Viennese Classical repertoire will lead inevitably to slowing of your tempo, and to dull, lackluster phrases. By contrast, what happens when you teach your ensemble the real Viennese Classical style can make a magical transformation in the musical outcome. And that style is too often taken for granted: just as many trained musicians have not been taught the indispensability of ornamentation in Baroque music, so too few really understand the expressiveness and intellectual sophistication of the Classical idiom. To touch brie®y, but—we hope—emphatically on a few points that apply directly to the Nelsonmesse: 1. Use rests and fermatas to give the music time to breathe. Don’t rush new attacks, and don’t be rigidly metronomic at the most important “seams” (that is, the transition points). 2. Remember that eighteenth-century treatises3 cautioned against playing notes of equal notated value as if they must be all alike in duration. Notes of equal value are not always equal in character—that is, in musical value. 3. In accompanying solo passages, be willing to give some extra space at cadences, and treat them as opportunities to ¤t into place brief (unwritten ) ornamentation. Be tasteful, certainly, but not hidebound; we know such cadenzas often...

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