Mass in Bb, Schöpfungsmesse (Creation Mass)
First performance: September 13, 1801
Vocal soloists (SATB)
Chorus (SATB)
Orchestra: 2 oboes, 2 clarinets in Bb and Eb, 2 bassoons, 2 horns in Bb and Eb, timpani, strings, organ (obbligato in Et incarnatus)
Program Notes by Martin Pearlman
Haydn's Schöpfungsmesse (Creation Mass), so called because it briefly quotes a passage from his oratorio The Creation, is not as frequently performed today as his dramatic Lord Nelson Mass or his Harmoniemesse. Nonetheless, Haydn scholar H. C. Robbins Landon has written that "many consider it Haydn's finest achievement in the genre." Haydn's contemporary, the composer Johann Adam Hiller, one of Bach's successors at the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, wrote on his copy of this mass, "the greatest work of a very great man, J. Haydn."
After his triumphant visits to England, where he composed his last symphonies, Haydn devoted the final years of his career mainly to a series of masses and oratorios. It had been some fourteen years since he wrote the last of his earlier masses, but in this last period of composition, 1796 to 1802, Haydn's output included the oratorios The Creation and The Seasons, as well as an annual series of masses to celebrate the name day of the Princess Josepha Maria Hermenegild, the wife of his patron, Nicholas II of Esterhazy. The composition of these masses was one of the few duties still required of the aging capellmeister. Compared to his earlier works, these late masterpieces are on a grander scale with writing that is more symphonic and demanding. For this most celebrated composer in the world, these new works represented not only the pinnacle of his achievement but also a new direction, inspired in part by having heard Handel's oratorios in England.
The Creation Mass is the fifth of Haydn's six late masses. It was completed on September 11, 1801, only two days before its premiere on the princess's name day. At the time, Haydn was busy preparing his oratorio The Seasons for publication, having premiered it earlier that year, and he had only a month and a half to compose the mass.
The brief eight-bar quotation from his oratorio The Creation, which gives this work its popular name, was initially controversial. It appears at the first occurrence of the words "Qui tollis peccata mundi" ("Thou who takest away the sins of the world") and comes from a duet in the oratorio in which Adam and Eve sing of the pleasures of the newly created world -- the morning, the evening breezes, and the sweetness of fruit. To some listeners, it was an inappropriate mixing of the sacred and the secular, but Haydn left it as he wrote it. Nonetheless, in the copy that he prepared for the Empress Marie Therese, he altered the passage and removed the quotation at her request.
Boston Baroque Performances
Mass in Bb, Schöpfungsmesse (“Creation Mass”)
April 8, 1988
NEC’s Jordan Hall, Boston, MA
Martin Pearlman, conductor
Soloists:
Sharon Baker, soprano
Gloria Raymond, mezzo-soprano
Frank Kelley, tenor
James Maddalena, baritone