Vivacious, merry and bright: that sums up the church music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791). His early sacred works Missa longa in C major K.262 and Litaniae de venerabili altaris sacramento K.243 were performed during the 2012 Salzburg Festival in Salzburg Cathedral, the very place where they were first heard in 1776. The doyen of period performance practice Nikolaus Harnoncourt, his Concentus Musicus Wien and the Arnold Schoenberg Choir restored the works to their former glory with the aid of soloists Sylvia Schwartz (soprano), Elisabeth von Magnus (mezzo-soprano), Jeremy Ovenden (tenor) and Florian Boesch (baritone). To approximate as closely as possible to the original sound, Nikolaus Harnoncourt borrowed the Cathedral Museum's gorgeous tapestries, located in the cathedral in Mozart's time, and re-hung them to moderate the building's resonant acoustics. The authentically historic instruments of Concentus Musicus Wien correspond to the instruments that were in use in Mozart's lifetime, ensuring that the Salzburg Cathedral concert would not only open a window into the performing conditions of Mozart's time but have artistic value as one of the most faithful interpretations of these two early works by Mozart. The concert was the jewel in the crown of the 2012 series Ouverture spirituelle, which opened the festival with greatworks of sacred music.
Mozart wrote more than 60 liturgical works in the course of his life, most of them between 1772 and 1781 in the service of the notoriously strict prince-archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo. The two works of 1776 performed in Salzburg in 2012 thus date from the middle of this period. These early works already suggest the style of the mature Mozart: lively and gay, these sacred works combine sequences worthy of opera with mighty counterpoint to display the composer's unmistakable style. Or as Nikolaus Harnoncourt puts it in the programme booklet: "In this work, I was surprised to hear the whole of Mozart right up to his Requiem."
Not that sacred music gave Mozart full freedom to express himself: restrictive church regulations limited the orchestral accompaniment in order to maximize intelligibility of the prescribed passages from the liturgy, and a 1754 prohibition of trumpets and drums in church was still in force. Nevertheless, each city interpreted the regulations in its own manner - now zealous, now lax. Letters by Mozart shed light on how the Mass was celebrated in Salzburg. Writing to Padre Martini in Bologna in 1776, Mozart commented that "a Mass with all parts, be it the most solemn, (.._) may not last longer than three-quarters of an hour at the most. It requires particular study of this kind of composition, as it must still be a Mass with all instruments, such as trumpets, kettledrums etc."
The Missa longa in C major K.262 is indeed a "Missa solemnis", that is to say a particularly exalted celebration of the Sacrament, at which festive wind instruments such as oboes, horns, trumpets and trombones are supported by timpani. The text of the Ordinary of the Mass receives dramatic and varied treatment from Mozart as he assigns it to the choir and the four soloists. The invocations of the Lord and of Christ in the Kyrie eleison are distinctly different: "Kyrie" is sung powerfully and authoritatively, while "Christe" has a soft and human touch, with a quartet of soloists and without trumpet accompaniment. Even the proportions of the individual movements are quite freely manipulated by Mozart: he centres this work on the Credo, which with its 406 bars takes much more space than the other sections of the Mass.
The Litaniae de venerabili altaris sacramento K.243, a litany for Palm Sunday 1776, contains its own special features: richly scored for wind, it is in E flat major, a somewhat unfamiliar key for church music; what is more, Mozart employs violas, which were not in general church use at the time. The use of the trombones is also untypical: normally they serve to support the vocal line, whereas here they are independent and separate from the choir. Nikolaus Harnoncourt sums up the message conveyed to him by Mozart's litany in an interview about the concert: "The statement it makes is: We need this sacrament, this bread is absolutely necessary for our life."
In addition to conducting, NIKOLAUS HARNONCOURT has done a great deal of scholarly research into music. After meticulously examining Mozart's works, he released a complete recording of them in 1998. Like Mozart, Harnoncourt is Austrian. He spent his childhood and youth in Graz and alter studying at the Vienna Academy of Music he played the cello in the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. Together with his wife Alice, in 1953 he established the orchestra he named Concentus Musicus Wien, with which, using period instruments, he attempted to reproduce the performance practices of the Renaissance and Baroque periods as far as possible. He also wrote philosophical theses on music, his analytical Musik als Klangrede (music as tonal speech) of 1982 remaining a standard work on historical performance practice to this day. He has additionally taught historical organology at the Salzburg Mozarteum since 1972. Nikolaus Harnoncourt made a name for himself as opera conductor in numerous performances in Europe and was made an officer in the French Legion of Honour in March 2012. He reaches an audience of millions in appearances at events like the New Year's Concert of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and is today known all over the world for his work in the field of historical performance practice.
The Spanish soprano SYLVIA SCHWARTZ studied singing with Wolfram Rieger, Thomas Ouasthoff and Julia Varady in Madrid and Berlin. She made her debut as Zerlina in Mozart's Don Giovanni at La Scala in Milan in 2005, a year after graduating. Since then she has performed at leading opera houses like the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, the Vienna State Opera, the Bavarian State Opera, the Bolshoy Theatre and the Theatre du Châtelet in Paris. She is also much in demand at international music festivals like the Edinburgh Festival, the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and those in Baden-Baden and Verbier. Sylvia Schwartz moreover enjoys an outstanding reputation as a concert and lieder singer.
Viennese-born ELISABETH VON MAGNUS initially learned the recorder and then trained as an actress before ultimately beginning to study singing. She made her debut in opera as Polly in Benjamin Britten's arrangement of The Beggars Opera by John Gay at the Munich Marstall Theatre. She has since sung in most European countries, as well as in the USA and Japan. She hastaken part in the Göttingen Handel Festival, the Carinthian Summer Festival, the "styriarte" in Graz, the Eisenstadt Haydn Festival and the festivals in Potsdam, Leipzig, Dresden, Lucerne and Schwetzingen. Elisabeth von Magnus made her debut at the Salzburg Festival in 1993.
The British tenor JEREMY OVENDEN studied with Norman Bailey and Neil Mackie at the Royal College of Music in London and privately with Nicolai Gedda. The tenor is equally at home on the opera stage and the concert platform. Jeremy Ovenden made his debut in Salieri's Europa riconosciuta conducted by Riccardo Muti at La Scala in Milan in 2004. Since then he has appeared at international music festivals, opera houses and concert platforms all over the world and has the reputation of being an outstanding Mozart tenor.
The baritone FLORIAN BOESCH regularly gives lieder recitals at venues like the Vienna Musikverein, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Schubertiade in Schwarzenberg, the Salzburg Mozarteum, the Wigmore Hall in London, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Edinburgh international Festival, the "styriarte" Festival, the Oxford Lieder Festival and the BBC, as well as in Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland, Portugal, the USA and Canada. In concerts, Florian Boesch closely collaborates with Nikolaus Harnoncourt, under whose direction he has toured Japan and sung at the Vienna Musikverein and the "styriarte" Festival. He won the Edison Klassiek Award for his recording of lieder and ballads by Carl Loewe in 2012.