Schubert's sixth and final setting of the Latin mass dates from 1828, the final year of his life. Like the A flat major Mass of 1819-22, it was not written in response to any commission, nor was it the result of any external prompting. For the conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt, this is only one of many indications that, in composing it, Schubert was responding to a quite specific need to express his innermost self: “This music ts not an act of pious devotion lint Schnbert's impassioned attempt to come to terms with death." For Harnoncourt, these last two Masses, which he conducted for the first time on successive evenings within the framework of the tenth Styriarte, rank alongside Beethoven's Missa solemnis as the "greatest, most important and artistically significant attempts to come to terms with the Christian liturgy. I believe that the social situation and audiences' mental outlook, together with the whole war in which religion and life are bound up with each other in Central Europe, means that, for listeners and musicians alike, these works have an expressive force that is quite literally capable of stirring us to the very depths of our souls. I do not think that a church is the right place for us to attempt to confront their underlying meaning," In consequence, Harnoncourt chose to conduct these works in the Stephaniensaal at Graz: "I have heard masses performed in the most varied venues and noticed how the space itself is invariably transformd by the piece's spiritual essence."
The home key of D 950 is E flat major, a tonality which, according to the German poet and writer on music, Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart (1739-1791), is "the tone of love, devotion and intimate communion with God, in three flat signs signifying the Holy Trinity". If this choice of tonality suggests that Schubert was wanting to point up a contrast with the "sepulchral" A flat major of the earlier Mass and to strike a calmer and more conciliatory note, these expectations are soon confounded. Schubert`s final setting of the mass is comparatively simple and more compact in its formal design and harmonic language, allowing the composer to concentrate entirely on the questions that concerned him most of all.
The relatively restrained and terse Kyrie eschews the traditional interplay between soloists and choir and is followed by a Gloria that presents the listener with an exceptional wealth of images, beginning with soaring triplets on the strings that seem to scale the very heights of Heaven, only to he cast back down to earth again. In the “Domine Deus, agnus Dei", it is not compassion but the sufferings of the Lamb of God that are depicted here. And the rnovement culminates in a powerful fugue on the words "Cum Sancto Spiritu", with Baroque element combining to impressive effect with Schubert's own individual message.
Vocal soloists are heard for the first time tn the Credo at the words "Et incarnatus est... et homo factus est". Even more than in the A flat major Mass, Schubert thus focuses attention on Christ's incarnation, turning it into the pirece's central concern. Equally instructive in this context is the way in which the words are distributed among chorus, soloists and orchestra in both these settings. First heard on the lips of one ol the two tenor soloists, the "Et incarnatus est" is wonderfully consoling, encouraging us to place all our hopes in Man and, as such, offering an alternative to this sustained attempt to come to terms with the incomprehensibility of the divine and its undertow of mystery.
As in almost all his earlier masses, Schubert omits part of the liturgical text from the vocal line and entrusts it, instead, to the orchestra as the voice of absolute music. In doing so, he not only harks back to the centuries-old tradition of antiphonal writing but, at the same time, reveals himself as far in advance of his time in propounding this concept of music as something absolute.
For Nikolaus Harnoncourt, there is no basis whatsoever to the reproach, so often levelled at Schubert by writers on the subject, that his failure to set the words "Et in unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam" in the Credo reveals an anti-ecclesiastical bias and might therefore be taken to imply an anti-religious outlook on the cornposer's part: "Ever since they were first set to music, the words of the Gloria and Credo have been treated selectively. It is not true that Schubert did not set a particular phrase because he did not believe in it - that would be an entirely worthless and false interpretation. Even Bach and Haydn, whose loyalty to the church is not in doubt, omitted individual lines. I should like to warn listeners against reading too much into these works on the basis of what others have written about Schubert and believing that he wrote this or that piece only because he held this or that view, because he hated his father, because he was gay or goodness knows what else. I think that it is Schubert's authentic voice that we hear rn these Masses. We should concentrate on the works themselves. Schubert speaks through his music, he speaks the language of music."
The suggestion that Schubert did not set certain passages of the mass for ideological reasons becomes completely untenable when we recall that, with the single exception of his first setting of the mass, he never included the words "Et exspecto resurrectionem". Yet, if this central idea were not contained in the music, the rest of the phrase, "et vitam venturi saeculi. Amen", would be completely meaningless.
Schubert's faith finds expression not only in his sacred works, including the Gesang der Geister über den Wassern, with which Harnoncourt prefaced his performances of both these Masses in Graz, but also in a diary entry dated 28 March 1824: "It is with faith that Man First comes into the world, and it long precedes intelligence and knowledge; for in order to understand anything, one must first believe in something; that is the higher basis on which feeble understanding first erects the pillars of proof. Intelligence is nothing else than analysed faith."