Mozart’s Other ‘Unfinished’: C-Minor Mass

In August, 1782, the 26-year-old Mozart, newly married and fresh from the success of “Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail,” started work on a Mass. Why he should have done so is a question that has since vexed scholars.

After all, Mozart was no longer in the service of his hated Salzburg employer, Archbishop Colloredo, and therefore no longer under any obligation to write church music. And his newfound home, Vienna, wanted him for other kinds of music. There is no record (or likelihood) of a commission.

The commonly accepted explanation for the composition of the Mass in C minor, K. 427, is that it was devised as a peace offering to Papa Leopold, who approved neither of Constanze, his new daughter-in-law, nor of Wolfgang’s increasing estrangement from the musical forms of the past.

So, the still reasonably tenable theory continues, young Mozart wrote a work relying on Baroque models--with healthy infusions of Italian-opera-style showmanship--and created the elaborate first-soprano part for Constanze to show Leopold that she was not only skilled but devout as well.

Mozart took the finished portions, Kyrie and Gloria, to Salzburg and had them performed there in Leopold’s presence. The composer later added part of a Credo and the whole of the Sanctus and Benedictus but never provided the Agnus Dei. The Mass is, therefore, like the Requiem, a mighty torso. But, unlike the Requiem, it wasn’t death that prevented its completion but, most likely, the pressures of life in the form of commissions.

The Mass in C minor has proven to be the favored Mozart work on recordings of this post-Bicentennial year, with four new editions issued in recent months, two of them in period style, with instruments of the composer’s time, and two with modern forces.

The contrast between the two antiquarian versions couldn’t be greater. A performance recorded live at last year’s Boston Early Music Festival (Denon 81757) has Andrew Parrott leading the excellent Festival Orchestra and the small, superbly responsive Handel & Haydn Society Chorus in a reading that would seem at first to be one of those intensely curt, clipped affairs that gives period performance a bad name.

But with the entrance of the sweetly soaring soprano of Nancy Armstrong in the first beatific measures of “Christe eleison,” Parrott softens his stance and proceeds to shape a performance that offers an ideal combination of mobility and breadth. Two delightful instrumental miniatures, the Epistle Sonatas, K. 67 and K. 329, are thrown in for good measure.

The version in which Philippe Herreweghe leads his Belgian choristers, Collegium Vocale and La Chapelle Royale, and the Orchestre des Champs Elysees may employ period forces but hardly offers the litheness and textural clarity thereby implied (Harmonia Mundi 901393).

Textures tend to be thickish and while the soprano soloists--Christiane Oelze and Jennifer Larmore--are impressively agile, the overall impression of the performance is one of reverential weightiness, with too much chugging along when, as in the “Cum Sancto Spirito,” it should blaze with fervor--as indeed it does under Parrott.

There’s a valuable bonus, however: Mozart’s “Meistermusik,” the original version, with chorus, of what was to be the celebrated “Masonic Funeral Music.”

Of the two modern-instrument editions of the Mass--both on the Deutsche Grammophon label--the 1990 live-performance version in which Leonard Bernstein leads the Chorus and Orchestra of the Bavarian Radio (431 791) is easily preferable to the tepid, shapeless studio job in which James Levine directs the Vienna State Opera Chorus and Vienna Philharmonic, with a solo contingent led by soprano Kathleen Battle, whose self-conscious cooing is exceptionally ill-suited to this music.

While Bernstein’s reading is hardly lean in texture or particularly stylish in other respects, its dark weightiness has a firm rhythmic underpinning. It also has soprano Arleen Auger’s wonderfully limpid delivery of the exquisite “Et incarnatus est.”

Where Levine’s interpretation occupies an entire CD, Bernstein offers two very substantial encores, his jolly if overweight reading of “Exsultate, jubilate,” with Auger again in superb form, and a dark, lush presentation of that sublime choral miniature from Mozart’s final months, “Ave verum corpus.”