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

Perhaps the shared key of the mass and the gradual was a factor in Mozart and Stoll’s
decision to place them in the same service.
From where did Stoll and Mozart obtain this work? One is reminded of Mozart’s
request in August 1788 for Nannerl to send him Haydn’s graduals in score, a request that
certainly could have been fulfilled with the dispatch of MH 362 amongst other pieces. 180 Of
course, Mozart need not have been the source, and Stoll is an equally likely candidate for
acquiring the gradual through his own contacts. Like Mozart’s Alleluia canon K. 553, the
Haydn gradual quotes the Easter Alleluia chant. It seems that the work attained a special
renown in Salzburg, as Haydn’s friend P. Werigand Rettensteiner recalled when reporting a
performance under the Konzertmeister of the Salzburg Hofkapelle, Franz Joseph Otter:
Sein Pax vobis alleluja, von dem wahrhaft harmonischen 40stimmigen Chor unserer Kapelle
vorgetragen, unter der Leitung unsers Musikdirektors Otter, dem Schüler und Freunde Haÿdns
ist eine Hÿmne, die von dem Himmel in die Erde herab zu tönen scheinet. 181
A slightly unusual feature of the instrumentation in Alleluia: In die resurrectionis is Haydn’s
use of trumpets in B flat. Although such instruments were known in Salzburg, and called for
by Mozart in the Litany K. 125 and the disputed Tantum ergo K. 142, their use in Vienna
was quite rare. Together with the lack of trumpets in the accompanying mass K. 275, the
practical difficulties of obtaining such instruments in Vienna leads one to wonder whether
Mozart and Stoll’s performance in Baden made use of them.
Apparently unrelated to the Haydn gradual is Mozart’s feigned assurance that Stoll
would receive a “Michl Haydnsche Meß” from Süssmayr, about which Süssmayr had already
written to his father. Süssmayr’s father, Franz Carl Süssmayr (1743-1805), who outlived his
180 MBA, iv.72.
181 Quoted in Rudolph Angermüller and Johanna Senigl, “Biographie des Salzburgischen Concertmeisters
Michael Haydn von Seinen Freunden Verfasset,” Mitteilungen der Internationalen Stiftung Mozarteum 37
(1989): 209. Angermüller and Senigl were unable to identify the work to which Rettensteiner is referring.
316