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

in the 1790s, but eventually established a position of preeminence in the performance
calendar of the court chapel.
The study of a complex question like the musical repertoire of the coronation services
necessarily requires the assimilation of many disparate sources, and in the absence of
definitive evidence some speculation and conjecture is inevitable. If however we become too
preoccupied with exactly which mass fit where and when, we risk overlooking the more
general point that in the decade following Mozart’s death, Salieri was responsible for the
acquisition of at least three of his colleague’s masses. Revisionist histories of this most famous
of compositional rivalries have understandably stressed the positive elements of Mozart and
Salieri’s relationship during Mozart’s lifetime, while passing over Salieri’s activities as
Hofkapellmeister in the 30 years following Mozart’s death. By the 1820s, the Hofkapelle
possessed at least eight Mozart masses, and Salieri’s acquisition and performance of these
works gave Mozart’s music a prominence at court that remained mostly elusive in the
composer’s own lifetime. In the score of K. 337, Salieri’s addition of doubling viola parts, a
subtle revision of the vocal-instrumental balance, speaks to his concern of presenting
Mozart’s music to its best effect. K. 337 has frequently suffered in comparison to the
Krönungsmesse, possessing neither a regular performance tradition nor the all-important
nickname. Stanley Sadie in his recent biography dismisses it as possessing “little distinctive
music and few of the felicities of its sister work.” 288 The fact however that it was the first
Mozart mass to be acquired by the Hofkapelle seems to be a vote of confidence in it by
Salieri, and this evidence alone should prompt a fresh look at a work that was, perhaps, the
real “coronation mass.”
288 Stanley Sadie, Mozart: The Early Years, 1756-1781 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 497.
243