Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we're opening
up a file that is quite honestly a bit of a paradox.
Yeah, it really is a ghost story in a way. Right.
We are looking at a work of art that is widely
considered a masterpiece, perhaps the absolute
masterpiece of its genre. And yet, if you were
to look at the physical manuscript, it doesn't
really exist. Not in full, anyway. Exactly. We
are talking about... Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's
Great Mass in C minor, catalog number K, 427.
And for you listening, this isn't just another
piece by Mozart. If you look at the canon of
Western music, this sits right at the top of
the mountain. Oh, absolutely. You'll see it listed
right next to his Requiem or the Jupiter Symphony.
But unlike those, this one is a fragment. It's
essentially a torso. It is. It's the musical
equivalent of a magnificent cathedral where the
architect built the nave and the altar, made
them more beautiful than anything else in the
country, and then, well, he just walked off the
job site before putting on the roof. That is
exactly the mystery we are trying to solve today.
Why would a composer at the absolute peak of
his powers, young, ambitious, arguably the most
talented musician in Europe, pour his heart into
this massive, deeply personal project, and then
just leave it unfinished? To answer that, we
have to look at the sources we've pulled for
this dive. We are dealing with historical letters,
modern musicological analysis by scholars like
Ulrich Conrad and, of course, the musical scores
themselves. The picture they paint is pretty
complicated. Very. It involves a secret engagement,
a heavily disapproving father, a sudden intense
obsession with Johann Sebastian Bach, and the
frantic attempts by modern editors to fix what
Mozart left behind. Let's start with the sound
itself. Before we get into the biography, we
really need to set the stage for you. When we
say Great Mass or Missus Alumnus, we aren't talking
about a quiet Sunday service with a single organist
playing softly in the background. Not at all.
No, this is big speaker music. In the 18th century,
a Missus Alumnus was the blockbuster movie of
church music. The absolute biggest scale possible.
Right. It is scored for a massive apparatus.
We're talking two soprano soloists, a tenor,
a bass, a large orchestra. And this is crucial.
A double chorus. Which means the choir is split
into two distinct groups. Yes. So they're essentially
singing against each other. Exactly. It creates
this immense stereo effect, this massive wall
of sound. It is grand. It is complex. And it
is incredibly demanding for the performers. This
wasn't something you just threw together for
a standard paycheck. So we have this massive
sonic ambition, which brings us to the context
of it all. Why was he writing this? The source
is Protestant Vienna. Around 1782 and 1783. Right.
Mozart is about 26 or 27 years old. And his life
is kind of a mess at this point. I think this
is a very fair description. He has just made
a radical break from his past. He quit his job
working for the Archbishop in Salzburg, literally
getting kicked out the door, by the way, and
moved to Vienna to be a freelance artist. Which
was incredibly risky back then. Huge risk. But
the bigger drama is actually in his personal
life. He has fallen in love. With Constanze Weber.
Right. And this is where the Great Mass gets
its romantic legend. The popular story, which
you will see in almost every concert program
note, is that this music was a vow. A vow to
God or a promise to Constance. Well, a bit of
both. The source of this legend is a specific
letter Mozart wrote to his father, Leopold, on
January 4th, 1783. You have to remember, Leopold
Mozart absolutely hated the idea of Wolfgang
getting married. He thought constancies were
just a distraction. A distraction, yes. He thought
her family were parasites who were going to ruin
Wolfgang's career. So Wolfgang is basically trying
to smooth things over. He is walking on eggshells
with his dad. He is. He writes this letter saying,
essentially, I made a promise in my heart to
write a mass if I could successfully bring her
to Salzburg as my wife. It's a very romantic
image. The young genius. besotted with his new
bride, writing this monumental music as a thank
you note to the universe for their marriage or
perhaps as a plea for her health because she
had been quite sick. That is the implication
people draw from it. But we do have to be a bit
careful with Mozart's letters. Why is that? Because
Mozart was a master manipulator, especially when
he was writing to his dad. The musicologist Ulrich
Conrad, who we have heavily featured in our notes
today, throws a bit of a bucket of cold water
on this whole romantic vow theory. What does
he say? He points out that this letter is the
only piece of evidence we have that connects
the mass to the marriage. So there's no diary
entry from Constanze saying, Wolfie is writing
this huge piece for me. No other letters to friends
confirming it. Nothing at all. And Conrad argues
the text of the letter is actually quite vague.
Mozart mentions a vow, yes, but he doesn't explicitly
say, I am writing the C minor mass because Constanze
recovered from illness. Or because we got married.
Right. He might have just been trying to impress
his deeply devout Catholic father. Sort of a,
look, dad, I'm still a good religious boy. I'm
writing a mass. Please accept my new wife. Precisely.
It is a peace offering, a strategic political
move within the family. But whether the vow was
genuinely spiritual or just strategic, the music
itself is very real. And in the summer of 1783,
he packs up the manuscript, packs up his new
wife, and they make the terrifying trip back
to Salzburg to meet the in -laws. I can only
imagine that dinner table. You get Leopold, the
sister Neryl, and the new wife they've been fiercely
gossiping about all in the exact same room. The
tension must have been thick enough to cut with
a knife. It was incredibly tense from all accounts.
Considence had never met them before this trip.
She fully knew they disapproved of her. And in
a way, the mask became a vehicle to prove her
worth to the family. Because she wasn't just
sitting in the audience for the premiere, was
she? She wasn't just a passive observer. No,
not at all. The premiere took place on Sunday,
October 26, 1783, at St. Peter's Abbey in Salzburg.
And Mozart put Constanza front and center. He
wrote the soprano solos specifically for her
voice. And the performers backing her up were
the Hoff music, right? The musicians of the Prince
Archbishop Count Hieronymus von Colorado. Yes,
his former colleagues, the very people he had
just spectacularly quit working for. So the stakes
are incredibly high. This is the part I find
absolutely fascinating. We have the sheet music,
so we can essentially reverse engineer what her
voice sounded like. What does the Great Mass
tell us about Constance A. Mozart as a singer?
It tells us she was formidable. These are not
simple, gentle hymns. If you listen to the Christe,
the Laudamus Ti sections, they are incredibly
athletic. They require a huge vocal range and
very precise coloratura. Those rapid fire runs
of notes. Exactly. She had to be a true virtuoso.
She really did. But the ultimate showcase is
the movement called the Et Incarnatus Est. This
is the moment in the credo that describes the
incarnation of Christ. This track stands out
completely from the rest of the work. If you
listen to the rest of the mass, it is heavy,
it's choral, it's almost oppressive in its grandeur.
And then suddenly... The clouds break and you
get this gorgeous pastoral scene. It is magical.
And it has a very unusual orchestration. It is
just the soprano voice, a flute, an oboe, and
a bassoon playing against a very light string
background. It sounds more like a wind concerto
than a standard church piece. That is a great
observation. It really is a concerto. Mozart
treats her voice as an equal partner to the woodwinds.
There is a section near the end, a written out
cadenza, where the singer, the flute, the oboe,
and the bassoon are all... all weaving around
each other in this intricate, complicated dance.
And remember the context for you listening. She
is singing this in Salzburg. Her father -in -law,
who thinks she is not nearly good enough for
his son, is sitting right there. Her sister -in
-law is sitting there. And Wolfgang has written
a piece that essentially says, listen to what
my wife can do. It is the ultimate mic drop moment.
It is intimate. It is incredibly exposed. And
if you mess it up, there's absolutely nowhere
to hide. It was a high wire act for Constanze.
So we have the premiere, we have the family drama,
we have the vocal showcase. But this brings us
back to the giant elephant in the room. You mentioned
earlier the architect walking off the job site.
What exactly is missing from this mass? When
we say unfinished, we mean massive structural
chunks of the standard liturgical text are just
gone. Walk us through the structure. For anyone
who isn't familiar with the Latin mass, what
are the pieces actually supposed to be? Okay,
so a standard Mass has five main parts. You have
the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Credo, the Sanctus,
and the Agnes Dei. And what do we actually have
in the C Minor Mass manuscript? We have the Kyrie
and the Gloria completely finished, and they
are massive. They span about 25 to 30 minutes
just by themselves. Then we get to the Credo.
He writes the first movement, the Credo in Unum
Deum, and the... Et incarnatus est for Constanze.
And then he just stopped. He just stops, like
put the pen down and walked away. Literally midstream.
The manuscript just trails off. The sections
about the crucifixion, the resurrection, the
life of the world to come, they simply do not
exist. And the final movement, the Agnus Dei.
Not a single note. The Sanctus and Benedictus
are also partially lost, right? Yes. They require
editorial reconstruction just to be performed
today because parts of the orchestration are
missing from the surviving pages. So wait. They
performed this in October 1783 at St. Peter's.
How do you perform a church service that stops
halfway through the core belief system of the
religion? Did everyone just awkwardly shuffle
out of the church? We have had to piece that
exact question together. The general consensus
among historians is that at the premiere, they
likely just performed the parts that were fully
ready. So just the Kyrie and Gloria? Mostly,
yes. And they maybe filled in the dapps with
simple plainchant or maybe just skipped them
entirely. The Sanctus and Benedictus were there,
but likely in a sketchy form that needed to be
fleshed out on the fly by the performers. That
is wild to think about. It really suggests that
getting the work out there, performing it in
Salzburg to make a point, was much more important
than it being perfect. Or that he simply ran
out of time. He only arrived in Salzburg in late
July and the performance was in late October.
He might have planned to finish it while he was
there and just got distracted by seeing old friends,
dealing with bad memories. and going on hiking
trips. But he never went back to it. That's the
real kicker. He lived for another eight years
after this. He wrote The Marriage of Figaro,
Don Giovanni, The Jupiter Symphony. Why leave
this specific masterpiece broken? This is where
we have to look closely at the style of the music,
because there is a strong argument that this
piece was actually quite difficult for him. Not
technically difficult, but intellectually difficult.
In what way? How is it different from his other
stuff? If you listen to this mass, it doesn't
sound like the Mozart of I Incline Enough music.
It sounds much darker, heavier, and more archaic.
It embodies the pomp of the old Salzburg traditions,
but it also anticipates the big symphonic masses
of Joseph Haydn. I notice our source notes specifically
mention a heavy Baroque influence, and specifically
Johann Sebastian Bach. And George Friedrich Handel.
Yes. And this is a crucial piece of the puzzle.
Just before writing this mass in Vienna, Mozart
had started hanging out with a man named Baron
Gottfried von Sweden. He was a diplomat, right?
A diplomat and a very serious music nerd. Then
Sweden had a massive personal library full of
music by Bach and Handel. You have to understand,
in 1782, Bach was considered old -fashioned.
He was ancient history. The public wanted light.
elegant catchy melodies not heavy complex counterpoint
you would be like a major pop star today suddenly
deciding to write an album exclusively in gregorian
chant a little bit yes But Mozart sees these
Bach scores in the library and it completely
blows his mind. He becomes obsessed. He starts
writing fugues. He starts studying intensely
how Bach weaves independent voices together.
And the great mass is the direct unfiltered result
of that study. So that double chorus we mentioned
earlier, that massive wall of sound, that is
him channeling Bach. Exactly. It is Mozart actively
trying to fuse his own modern operatic style,
like those solos for Constanze, with the ancient
rigorous. power of Bach, which you hear clearly
in the choruses. That is a really heavy lift,
trying to seamlessly combine two totally different
musical languages into one piece. It is. And
some scholars think that maybe he wrote himself
into a corner creatively. The sheer weight of
the piece, the intense complexity of it, maybe
he just lost the spark. Or, more pragmatically,
once he left Salzburg and went back to Vienna,
there was simply no market for it. Right. Because
in Vienna, the Emperor Joseph II had actively
restricted church music. He didn't want big orchestras
in church. He wanted everything simple and austere.
So Mozart, being a working freelancer who needed
to pay rent, probably looked at this massive
pile of incomplete sheet music and thought, well,
no one in Vienna is going to pay me to finish
this. I need to write a piano concerto I can
actually sell tickets for. He was a pragmatist
at the end of the day. Ruthlessly so. In fact,
he didn't even let the music he'd already written
go to waste. A few years later, he took the music
from the Kyrie and Gloria and recycled it into
a cantata called Davide Penitente. Reduce, reuse,
recycle. Exactly. He kept the music almost exactly
the same. he just changed the Latin mass text
to Italian poetry and added two new arias. So
the music itself survived and got performed,
but the mass as a complete entity remained a
fragment. Which brings us to today. Because if
you go on your streaming app right now and search
for Mozart mass in C minor, you will find dozens
of recordings. And they sound completely finished.
You don't hear the track stop abruptly in the
middle of a phrase. Who is doing the finishing?
Welcome to the editorial puzzle. This is a huge,
highly debated topic in modern musicology. Since
the work is unfinished, if you want to perform
it in a concert hall today, you have to decide
exactly how you're going to patch the holes.
It seems from the sources like there are two
main philosophies here. Right. Philosophy number
one, the purists. These are editors like H .C.
Robbins Landon, Helmut Dater, and Franz Bayer.
Their entire goal is to do the absolute minimum
necessary. So they just make the existing notes
playable. Completion via orchestration, basically.
Correct. They take the sketches Mozart left,
fill in a missing viola part, or clean up a trumpet
line, because Mozart often wrote in shorthand,
but they absolutely do not compose new music.
If Mozart didn't write in Agnes Day, you don't
get an Agnes Day. So the piece still feels fundamentally
incomplete when you listen to those versions.
It feels historically honest. You hear exactly
what he wrote and nothing else. But for a liturgical
church service or even a musically satisfying
concert, it can feel a bit abrupt. It just stops.
And the second philosophy. Philosophy number
two. The completists. These are editors like
Jorg Alois Schmidt, Philip Wilby and Robert Levin.
Their argument is Mozart clearly intended a full
mass. So let's give the audience a full mass.
But how do you write a fake Mozart movement without
it sounding terrible? I mean, you can't just
noodle around on the piano and hope it sounds
like one of history's greatest geniuses wrote
it. You use the parody technique we talked about
earlier. Just like Mozart recycled his own music
for that Davide Penitente Cantata, these editors
take movements from Mozart's other masses or
sketches he never ended up using, and they adapt
them to fit the missing text. So they build a
Frankenstein monster, but they use only genuine
Mozart body parts. That is a great way to put
it. It's a very sophisticated, highly educated
collage. Robert Levin, for example, composed
a new credo section, but he based it strictly
on Mozart's existing themes and style. The idea
is to create something that theoretically could
have been what Mozart wrote. It is deeply controversial,
though. Oh, highly. Some purists think it is
incredibly presumptuous. They say, how dare you
try to finish a genius's work. Others think it
is totally necessary to bring the work to life
for modern audiences. You also have composers
like Robert Xavier Rodriguez, who just went ahead
and composed a totally new Agnes Di to finish
it off. It really makes choosing a recording
difficult. It does. If you listen to the famous
Leonard Bernstein recording, or the John Eliot
Gardner one, or Neville Mariner, you aren't just
hearing Mozart. You are hearing a specific editor's
interpretation of the manuscript. It is a total
rabbit hole. You even have versions like the
one by Benjamin Gunnar Kors, where he just gives
you a standalone credo in Agnes Day and says,
here, mix and match this with whatever other
edition you want to use. It truly is a choose
-your -own -adventure mass at this point. So
looking at the big picture here, we have this
piece of music that is torn between two worlds.
It is torn between Salzburg and Vienna, between
the old Bach counterpoint style and the new melodic
gallant style. between a love letter to his wife
and a peace treaty with his father. And fundamentally
between existence and non -existence. Exactly.
Why do you think we obsess over this specific
one so much? Mozart wrote plenty of totally finished
masses. Why is the broken one the most famous?
I think the fragment quality actually helps it
endure. It is the exact same reason we stare
at the Venus de Milo or ancient Greek ruins.
The missing parts actively invite our imagination
to participate. we fill in the blanks with our
own idea of perfection we do But also looking
at the music itself, this was Mozart leveling
up. You can visibly hear the struggle in the
music. You can hear him wrestling with Bach's
influence, trying to expand what a mass could
even be. It has a gravity and a darkness that
his earlier pretty Salzburg masses just do not
have. It is the sound of an artist becoming an
independent master. Yes. And there is a real
provocation here for the listener. If Mozart
had finished it, if we had a perfectly polished
standard Agnes Day. tied up with a neat bow,
would we analyze it as closely? That is a great
point. Or does the silence where the credo cuts
off force us to really listen to the notes that
are there? I want to build on that for a second
because there is something we haven't touched
on yet. If he had finished it, he would have
had to make it fit into a standard church service.
He might have had to dilute that intense radical
Bach counterpoint just to please the archbishop
or the emperor. That is a very real possibility.
So by leaving it unfinished, by literally walking
away, he actually preserved its radical nature.
It never got smoothed out into a polite, conventional
piece of church music. It remains this wild,
boundary -pushing experiment forever. I absolutely
love that interpretation. The silence isn't just
a failure to finish. It's a boundary that protects
the genius of what he did right. Exactly. The
silence is part of the music. Well, for those
of you listening, I have a homework assignment
for you. Tonight, find a recording of this mass,
it doesn't matter which editor's version, and
skip straight to the et incarnatus est. Good
choice. Close your eyes and just imagine that
cavernous stone abbey in Salzburg in 1783. Imagine
Constance standing there, terrified but completely
ready, singing those complex lines to a family
that didn't want her there. And listen to that
flute, oboe, and bassoon weaving around her.
It really brings the history right into the room
with you. It does. Thank you so much for helping
us unpack this unfinished giant today. It has
been a real journey through the archives. It
was a pleasure. And to our listeners, keep diving
deep. We'll see you on the next one.