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Popular choral works often make routine reappearances, like Handel’s “Messiah” at Christmas and Bach’s “Passions” during Lent. For its next concert, the Eastman-Rochester Chorus is presenting Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis,” a work that is performed and anything but routine: profoundly moving, infinitely detailed, and enormously demanding for musicians and listeners.
ERC conductor William Weinert says the effort involved in producing the “Missa Solemnis” is infinitely worthwhile.
Weinert recalls first encountering Beethoven’s huge, gnarly work as a graduate student in choral conducting.
“I thought to myself, ‘I just don’t get it!’ and ‘I won’t have to look at this again.’ The ‘Missa Solemnis’ was like Mount Everest; it was beautiful, and I respected it, but I didn’t need to climb it.”
He did have to look at it again: Shortly after he arrived at Eastman in the 1990s, Weinert was charged with training the chorus for a guest appearance by Robert Shaw, the great American choral conductor. Shaw’s choice of repertoire: Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis.”
As Weinert studied and coached the work again, something began to click. As Eastman’s director of choral activities, he soon programmed and conducted the “Missa Solemnis” on his own with the Eastman Rochester Chorus, and the May 2 performance will be the third he has conducted in Rochester.
This late Beethoven masterpiece was one of music’s great missed deadlines. In 1819, the composer announced his intention to write a grand mass for the installation in 1820 of a friend and former pupil, Archduke Rudolf, as an archbishop. Beethoven finished his Mass in 1823. What caused the delay?
Beethoven was baptized as a Catholic and wrote a conventional setting of the Mass early in his career. But like many people who experienced the Enlightenment in the late 18th century, he turned away from the church’s doctrines. Beethoven was deeply interested in spiritual questions all his life, but no one knows exactly why, in his 50s, this lapsed Catholic suddenly decided to write a huge statement of faith. We do know he took this decision very seriously.
“Beethoven took the text of the Catholic Mass and decided to relearn the whole thing, studying each word and phrase,” says Weinert. “It was as if he sat down with a Latin-German dictionary and translated and studied line by line.”
Beethoven also studied Gregorian chants, hymns, and earlier religious compositions.
But for all his explorations of the past, Weinert observes, the resulting “Missa Solemnis” was “his own interpretation of everything in the Mass text. You can sense that he constantly asked himself, ‘How can I make these ideas clear in music?’ There is nothing conventional about this work.”
The “Missa Solemnis” is not only a great piece of music, but also a completely individual statement of faith: sometimes serene and assured, occasionally joyous and violent.
It begins with a firm, sustained chord for the orchestra—“a monolithic thing—like God,” says Weinert. “But the entrances of the chorus and the soloists have a more intimate, pleading sound. Beethoven tells you from the start that this is going to be his very personal interpretation of the Mass text.”
Beethoven offers many more odd, sometimes outrageous moments after that opening chord. The “Gloria” is full of unbridled energy, and its last notes are an unaccompanied shout of “Amen.” Later in the Mass, he writes two separate vocal fugues to the same words, “Et vitam venturi est” (“And the life of the world to come”). Weinert describes one as “delicate, intimate, peaceful,” the other as “a wild outburst. It’s as if Beethoven can’t decide which setting better describes heaven, so he decided to use both.”
One of the most beautiful touches is in the “Benedictus” (“Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord”), in which a glowing, virtuosic violin solo is heard throughout—a “blessed” sound. Adds Weinert: “What other Mass contains a violin concerto?” Beethoven’s concluding “Dona nobis pacem” (“Give us peace”) is anything but peaceful, with drums and brass fanfares reflecting the European wars of the early 19th century.
Despite the myriad challenges of the “Missa Solemnis,” says Weinert, “everybody in this work gets something good to play.”
Everybody in this case is a chorus of about 170 singers, ranging from Eastman and University of Rochester students to community members, and the Eastman School Symphony Orchestra, whose concertmaster, Sofia Grimes, will play that heavenly violin solo.
The four vocal soloists also have demanding parts, but Weinert says, “they really function throughout as a quartet. It’s a team effort.” They are Caroline Sullivan, soprano; Emily Kondrat, mezzo-soprano; Luke Honeck, tenor; and S Joshua Sheppard, bass-baritone.
“Beethoven was profoundly deaf by this time and was writing meta-music—he was not concerned with writing a piece that can be readily performed,” says Weinert. “Nobody can play all the notes in the ‘Missa Solemnis’; there are places in this music that are literally impossible for an individual musician to perform. But when all the individuals join to play as a group, then it all becomes possible.
“As Robert Shaw said of the ‘Missa Solemnis,’ ‘the impossibility of it is the point.’”
Eastman-Rochester Chorus and Eastman School Symphony Orchestra under William Weinert present Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis,” Op. 123, on Friday, May 2, at 7:30 p.m. in Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre. Admission is free.
David Raymond is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer.
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