The Tallis Choir of Toronto Online - Programme Preview: A Mozart Coronation

A Mozart Coronation

If you stand on the walls of the Archbishop's Palace overlooking the city of Salzburg today, and look across the green expanse of farmland, you can just spy the Rococo towers of the great pilgrimage church of Maria Plan. Mozart must have stood on that spot many times, and it is not hard to imagine him sending a prayer to the miracle-working Virgin of the shrine to deliver him from the servitude of the Archbishop of Salzburg. In fact. Archbishop Hieronymos Colleredo has had bad press for two centuries. A self-professed son of the Enlightenment, he enthusiastically took up the liturgical reform launched by the Emperor Joseph II in the 1780's. The Josephists envisioned a simpler, vernacular rite with popular participation. The elaborate (and expensive) art music of the Mozarts and Haydns had no place in the new scheme (Schubert’s German Mass is perhaps the finest example of the new style). The reform was a well-intentioned failure — autocratic reforms usually are — and proved wildly unpopular. One example will suffice: in a laudable attempt to reduce the costs of funerals, the Emperor decreed that common graves would be the norm. Today Mozart's body lies unmarked in one of these mass burials.

The Mozart family chafed at the musical restrictions — Colleredo allowed only 45 minutes for a complete high mass with orchestra! - and ultimately drove Wolfgang out to find a position in Vienna. It is still a critical commonplace to assert that Mozart stopped composing for the church as soon as he was free of Salzburg, and that his liberal Freemasonry superseded his Catholicism. The facts are more mundane: Mozart composed on commission. If he wasn't paid, he didn't compose. Most church commissions were handled by the able composers who occupied the Kappelmeister positions in the principal churches and at court. Apologies to Amadeus, but Antonio Salieri and Michael Haydn wrote quite splendid liturgical music. And in the last decade of the century, with the failure of Josephism, elaborate church music was making a comeback. It is not widely known that in 1791 Mozart applied for the most prestigious ecclesiastical position in Vienna, Choirmaster of St. Stephen's Cathedral. In preparation, he asked his Salzburg friends to send the scores of his earlier masses and church works so that he would have a repertoire ready at hand. In addition, he was engaged in the composition of a blockbuster that would impress everyone - the Requiem. The long-awaited news arrived: Mozart was the new Choirmaster of the Cathedral. But at that hour the composer was already on his deathbed, desperately trying to mouth the rhythm of the timpani in the Requiem with each dying gasp.

We can only speculate what Western music might have been like if Mozart had survived and turned from the opera house to the organ loft. Would the Requiem and Beethoven's Missa Solemnis have been typical of the new Viennese church style? To commemorate the 250^th anniversary of Mozart's birth, this evening's performance recreates a celebration which we can only wish had actually taken place in 1791: a festal Eastertide mass to the Miraculous Virgin of Maria Plan, conducted by the Cathedral's new Kappelmeister, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, in thanksgiving for his recovery from a recent grave illness. For an hour or two, let us cheat death and imagine.