I’ve been crossing works off of my musical bucket list this year at this summer’s festivals – an act from a Die Walküre and big chunks for Verdi’s Otello in Astoria, and now Beethoven’s massive and enigmatic Missa Solemnis in Eugene at the Oregon Bach Festival.
Whereas Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (written roughly contemporaneously to the mass) proceeds with clearly articulated logic and pacing, Missa Solemnis is more in the vein of his late string quartets. The writing is sometimes awkward for the string parts – much as with those late quartets – and there are surprising (even to modern ears) contrasts of tempo, dynamics, and timbre. I’ll spare the history lesson, but the essence of this work is that Beethoven spent time studying those masses that had come before, all the way back to the pre-Renaissance masters. So his harmonic language is imbued with more of those modal influences than other works of the time, and less classically structured.