Talk:Mass in B Minor

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Contents 1 Recordings List 2 Possible problems with some of this article. 3 Major edits on Chronology 4 Status as a mass

[edit] Recordings List

Someone for some reason removed the list detailing recordings of this work, which I personally found very useful. Any reason for that? John Holly 11:56, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Possible problems with some of this article.

There seem to be several problems with this article, but I wanted to open up this article for discussion before altering it.

1. The first performance seems to have been after the great one Bach's death, when his son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach performed the Gloria section (but not the entire Mass) in Berlin.

Not sure why 'the great one' appears in this sentence, it makes the sentence read very strangely and is a personal opinion.

2. Second, the aging Bach, having spent his life seeking musical excellence, may have begun to think that the German cantatas he had spent so much of his professional life writing were something of a fad in music, restricted to the German Lutheran churches and, as he correctly predicted, the 18th century, whereas the Latin Mass was almost universal as a form of church music. Thus, the Mass in B Minor represents Bach's effort to place his music in this more timeless context.

This is complete speculation, there is NO evidence for this, and I suspect it as highly inaccurate - this kind of historicism and a composer's concern for his/her legacy did not emerge until much later - when composers such as Beethoven began to make concerted efforts to arrange for collected editions of their works to be published.

Christoph Wolff in his biography of Bach conjectures something like this, and believes the presence of "archival copies" of some of his greatest works show that Bach expected at least his own progeny to perform his music (as he performed the music of his ancestors such as Johann Christoph Bach)

3. are written in a wobbly, uneven hand, indicating that Bach wrote these passages while he was sick and surely contemplating his own death.

Again, this is speculation which does not really add anything to the article.

Once again, this is well documented in reliable sources (other than the "surely contemplating his own death" part, but sourcing would be appropriate.

4. Many older cantatas by Bach himself are incorporated into the Mass in B Minor, which not only adds to accuracy of the work as a picture of Bach's creative genius but also preserves some of these older works, as the original scores of some of them have been lost. This is a common technique in Bach's composition and is usually described as "parody". Other works where parody exists in Bach include the Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248. Even when models survive, it is still unclear whether they themselves are descended from earlier models. The only positive evidence of Bach freshly composing in this work, is the Confiteor section of the Credo. Details of the parodied movements and their sources are listed in the movement listing.

It is true that Bach used parody in this mass, in fact it is present in many works. I object to the phrase 'which not only adds to accuracy of the work as a picture of Bach's creative genius' - as meaningless other than to inform us of the author's opinion of Bach. The technique is not 'usually' described as parody, it is ALWAYS referred to as parody. It is insufficient to write about the issue of parody in a couple of inaccurate lines, a separate article is needed, and a useful starting point would be Das Bach Jahrbuch, I think 1927 and 1965, but this is from memory, if anyone fancies doing this.

Let me know what you think before I edit this page.

[edit] Major edits on Chronology

Much of this article is un-sourced and, having found my copy of Mellers I see that the chronology differs from his. I have revised the chronology following his (published) statements, but there may well be items from the old text which are true, verifiable and useful, so I preserve it here: "Bach composed what would become the Gloria of the B minor Mass for Christmas Day, 1724, and added, in 1731, a Kyrie so that he could present an abbreviated Mass (Kyrie plus Gloria, BWV 232a) to the Saxon Elector and Polish King Augustus III of Poland as part of a request to add the title, "Electoral Saxon Court Composer", to his name, a political move he hoped would bolster his standing in Leipzig, where he was having minor political skirmishes with the town council. The score sat on Bach's, and the Elector's, shelves, unperformed, until 1737, when Bach revisited it. He began making small revisions to the Kyrie and Gloria, and added the Credo and Sanctus over the next two years. In the 1730s, when he may have been toying with the idea of expanding the initial Kyrie-Gloria Mass, Bach studied and performed Palestrina's Missa sine nomine, which he then copied with revisions, and Antonio Lotti's Misse sapientiae. Other works with direct bearing on the Mass in B minor include an unnamed Mass in F major by Giovanni Battista Bassani, to which Bach added a setting of Credo in unum Deum (BWV 1081) and Antonio Caldara's Magnificat, the "Suscepit Israel" portion of which forms the basis for Bach's contrapuntal study BWV 1082. Notably, Bach's only other five-part choral work is his D major setting of the Magnificat." NBeale 09:17, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Status as a mass

I especially valued the observation "It must be remembered that the Lutheran Churches of his day frequently retained Latin masses." Most commentators on the B Minor Mass insist that Lutheran churches only used the Kyrie and Gloria (and Bach did use just those parts in his short masses), and they make something of Bach's decision to use a so-called "Catholic" mass for his B-Minor. For what it's worth, in the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) we've used all parts in our worship service, from "Lord, Have Mercy" through "Grant us peace," for as long as I remember, which is why Bach's full text always seemed normal liturgy to me. (Of course, the length of this magnificent work is unsuitable for either Lutheran or Catholic worship services, but I doubt that Bach cared any longer about that limitation to his work at this point in his life.) SteveRoper (talk) 03:59, 26 November 2007 (UTC)