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

speaking, this is an attractive theory, for two reasons: firstly, Mozart himself was in Prague in
September 1791 to supervise the production of La clemenza di Tito, which had indeed been
written for the coronation celebrations. Secondly, the idea that Salieri gave his supposed
nemesis Mozart considerable prominence at the event by performing the latter’s masses
appeals to revisionist accounts of the relationship between the two composers. Indeed, if one
were to believe H.C. Robbins Landon’s 1791: Mozart’s Last Year, it would appear to be an
open and shut case:
Among the works that Salieri brought with him [from Vienna] – the reader will be astonished to
learn – were no fewer than three Mozart masses in manuscript score and parts:
K.258...K.317(‘Coronation’) and the magnificent and nowadays hardly known K.337. 214
How much evidence is there actually for such a statement? Discovering the answer requires a
close study of early performance materials from the Hofkapelle.
As we have seen, Salieri seems to have made attempts in the early 1790s to expand
the repertoire of the Hofkapelle by ordering more recent music and commissioning new
works. By the years around 1800, the Hofkapelle possessed four Mozart masses in addition to
the Requiem, and these works, together with masses by Haydn and Schubert remained at the
centre of the ensemble’s repertory, ever after the structure of the Hofkapelle was
fundamentally altered at the end of the Empire. The most popular of Mozart’s masses at the
Hofkapelle was the Coronation Mass, which was performed almost every year from 1822 to
1918, sometimes on three or even four occasions in any one year. 215 Even after the work had
long appeared in print, the ensemble continued to use their original hand-copied parts well
into the twentieth century. A good example may be seen in Figure 3.17, showing the last
214 Landon, 1791: Mozart's Last Year, 104.
215 Performance dates appear on the Hofkapelle’s parts for the mass. See also Rudolph Angermüller, "Zu den
Kirchenmusik-Produktionen der K.K. Hofkapelle in Wien 1820-1896: Mozart - Beethoven,"
Kirchenmusikalisches Jahrbuch 69 (1986): 23-71, Richard Steurer, Das Repertoire der Wiener Hofmusikkapelle im
Neunzehnten Jahrhundert, vol. 22, Publikationen des Instituts für Österreichische Musikdokumentation
(Tutzing: H. Schneider, 1998).
202