MOZART AND THE PRACTICE OF SACRED MUSIC, 1781-91 a ...

the tutti forces between four-part, five-part and double four-part are unprecedented in
Mozart’s Salzburg sacred music. In Vienna, double-choir textures were not unknown but
certainly rare, and the bass trombone was not a usual member of the Viennese church
orchestra at this time. 108 It may be that Mozart had in his mind an “ideal” ensemble that
could be replicated in practice only imperfectly, even by the combined forces of St. Peter’s
and the Salzburg Hofkapelle.
Much has been made of the stylistic archaism present in some movements of the
mass, allegedly inspired by Mozart’s study of “old music” under the encouragement of van
Swieten. 109 As early as 1826, Stadler observed that the mass was “ganz in Händels Manier
geschrieben.” 110 While one would not wish to play down the potential impact of Handelian
choral writing on Mozart’s compositional thinking, our knowledge of the stylistic influences
on K. 427 will remain incomplete as long as the contemporary “native” traditions of
Catholic sacred music in central Europe remain little understood. Much of what seems self-
consciously retrospective about the C minor Mass may reflect aspects of contemporary
traditions that Mozart did not have the opportunity or inclination to explore in Salzburg.
Example 2.1 shows the opening of a duet from a litany by Albrechtsberger, written in the
same year as Mozart began work on the C minor Mass. The ritornello, with its imitative
beginning and subsequent Fortspinnung would not be out of place in a work written half a
century earlier, but the piece owes its origins not to an abandoned past but rather to a
108 Reutter’s Mass in D (Hofer 80) is scored for two four-part choirs in the Amen of the Gloria; see the
following chapter. The Missa Sancti Bernardi (Hofer 74) is scored for five-part choir, SSATB. On the question
of trombones in Viennese church orchestras, see Biba1783, 70-71. The Waisenhausmesse K. 139, written for
Vienna, includes a bass trombone part, but early performance material from the Hofkapelle for Mozart’s masses
shows that only alto and tenor trombones were normally employed. The single exception is the parts for the
Requiem, A-Wn, HK 2879, which include a bass trombone part.
109 See, for example, Silke Leopold, “Händels Geist in Mozarts Händen: Zum 'Qui Tollis' aus der C-Moll-
Messe KV 427,” in Mozart-Jahrbuch 1994 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1995), 89-99.
110 Maximilian Stadler, Vertheidigung der Echtheit des Mozartischen Requiem (Vienna: Tendler und von
Manstein, 1826), 10.
99