www.montereycountynow.com JULY 10-16, 2025 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 19 Instead, independent states, technically parts of the Holy Roman Empire, dominated the region, such as the Kingdom of Prussia, where Mendelssohn was born (Hamburg) and raised (Berlin), or the Kingdom of Saxony, where—in Leipzig—Bach had his longest tenure and where Mendelssohn worked later in life and died. Mozart spent his life between Salzburg and Vienna, towns that belonged to the Habsburg Empire, which consisted of many ethnicities— Hungarians, Czechs and Poles, being more a family possession (the House of Habsburg) than a fixed nationality. Many duchies and principalities meant many courts and regional capitals, each in need of a court composer or a church organist. And this is where the story of Mass in B minor begins— with Bach, yet again, trying to land a job. Bach had been competing for and quitting jobs all his life. Early in his career, he was jailed by the grand duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach for leaving his position for a more lucrative post at the court at Anhalt-Köthen. The Bachs were a family of professional musicians who considered music a way to support themselves and treated their career seriously. Another consideration that Bach had was, between two wives, 20 children to raise. He needed money. Bach started working on Mass in B minor in 1733 during the War of Polish Succession, when European leaders competed for the throne of Catholic Poland. Saxonian August III won, promptly converting to Catholicism, and Bach, a Protestant, applied to become the king’s court composer with a mass based on both Protestant and Catholic orders, making it absolutely unique—and useless in practice. Mass in B minor was never conducted during Bach’s life; he finished it, already blind, a year or two before his death. It was first presented to an audience in 1859 after none other than Mendelssohn rediscovered Bach and made him a star. Mass in B minor feels monumental, thanks to Bach’s artistry of the fugue, the most elaborate musical form of the Baroque, used at the time as a test of the composer’s skills. Based on polyphony (multiple voices) and imitation (repetition at different pitches), a fugue has one or more themes which recur frequently throughout the composition. It’s the fugue that gives Mass in B minor its depth and power, harmony and the sense of traveling between heaven and hell—majestic and mysterious, evoking a range of emotions. (During the Carmel Bach Festival, the audience can hear other fugue-based compositions from Bach’s The Art of Fugue.) With the end of the Baroque era, the fugue became less dominant as a technique, but not for Mozart, and not for Mendelssohn. Both became obsessed with the form. Salzburg-born, Viennabased Mozart was deeply influenced by Bach; nowhere is his fascination with the fugue more visible than in the Requiem, which is also a mass, but a mass for the dead, a painful appeal to God to save the souls, written in the Catholic tradition. The composition shows Mozart’s dark streak, perhaps because Requiem was written on his death bed. Just like Bach before his death was rushing to finish the by-then-abandoned Mass in B minor, Mozart was rushing to complete his mass, ordered by an anonymous source who was willing to pay a thousand florins for the piece (around $20,000 in today’s money), 50 percent in advance. Even though Mozart was busy with other pieces, he agreed and worked on the composition to exhaustion. In a delirium of stress, he supposedly came to the conclusion that he got poisoned and that he was writing the “mass for the dead” for himself. It is perhaps more sensible to think that Requiem killed Mozart as a source of stress, especially the killer double fugue (two fugues going on at the same time with two themes) he introduced to the piece. While Bach was 65 when he died, with Mass in B minor completed, Mozart died at age 35 with an unfinished piece that had to be completed after his death so that his widow and six children would get the money. And Requiem got finished, even though we are not sure by whom. The composer wrote a couple of first segments, but the following parts had only the vocal parts written, without orchestration, added later, most likely by 25-year-old Franz Xaver Süssmayr, who claimed Mozart instructed him in detail before he died. The most thrilling element of Requiem is Lacrimosa, which also had to be finished by someone else (one story says Requiem was finished by Joseph Leopold Eybler who definitely had “...the fugue became less dominant as a technique, but not for Mozart, and not for Mendelssohn, who both became obsessed with the form.” SKUNK TAXI/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM
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