Mozart’s Great Mass in C minor

Repertoire

Performers

Programme notes

Mozart’s Great Mass in C minor is, after Requiem, his most spectacular religious work. Gone was that handful of “short” Masses that Archbishop Colloredo had made him compose when he worked in his service at the court of Salzburg. Colloredo forced him to create functional religious music: no frills, no repetitions, no large orchestral masses. Mozart, now installed in Vienna and freed from that yoke, wrote the Great Mass, venturing into expressiveness and looking for the different states of mind that he experienced as a man, between light and darkness.

It masters all the technical resources that it used, from the old  fugue style to arias in a quasi-operatic format that fully exploited the choir, sometimes in eight voices. The result was a monumental, powerful and profound work that he premiered in Salzburg, far away from the archbishop’s palace. Back in Vienna, Mozart spent a few days in Linz, where he was asked to hold a concert. Since he had no work in his briefcase, he decided to compose a symphony that he completed in three days. The Linz Symphony breathes luminosity and freshness on all four sides: direct, cheerful, technically perfect and like that indescribable air that only the genius from Salzburg knew how to impress in his music.