An A-R Edition Reintroduces a Salieri Mass to the Viennese

On 14 April 2002 the Mass in D Minor (1805) by Antonio Salieri received its first performance since 1824 in the Vienna Hofkapelle, the former imperial chapel where Salieri himself directed the music as Hofkapellmeister. The recent performance by sopranos and altos from the resident Vienna Choir Boys, tenors and basses from the Vienna State Opera, and instrumentalists from the Vienna Symphony, was brilliantly led by Uwe Christian Harrer, the artistic director of the Hofkapelle and thus a musical descendant of Salieri. The occasion honored the golden anniversary of the ordination of the Papal Nuncio to Austria, Archbishop Donato Squicciarini, who was in attendance, along with other ecclesiastical dignitaries, civic authorities, and lovers of liturgical music. As the editor of the Mass in D Minor (I also supplied the performance materials), I was deeply gratified and excited to be present at this historic revival of Salieri’s music. The event brought home vividly one of the chief goals of editing: to enable a musical work of the past to be performed and heard today. Also meaningful was the chance to experience the Mass unfolding within its intended  context, in the framework of a liturgical service, in which each of the six movements of the Ordinary takes its place in the full rite of the Roman Catholic mass. Scholars and publishers of sacred music ought to encourage the church in America to embrace its great musical heritage!

My own interest in Salieri began while I was a graduate student studying organ with Anton Heiller under a Fulbright grant at the Hochschule für Musik in Vienna. Combing through the archives and libraries of the former imperial city in search of some forgotten or undiscovered organ pieces that I could present to the organ world, I came upon the autograph manuscript of Salieri’s Concerto per l’organo in the Austrian National Library. Through my edition, this rare large-scale organ concerto of the late-classical period received a modern premiere on one of my doctoral recitals; since then it has been frequently performed and also recorded.

Salieri’s sacred music offered me a whole new adventure. Thanks to the good offices of a colleague in Vienna, Dr. Leopold Kantner, I gained access to the Hofkapelle archive, a private  institution which at that time possessed an extensive collection of sacred music, the working library of the emperor’s musical ensemble. Of the many treasures housed in that archive, a large body of autograph manuscripts of Salieri probably constitutes the most important component of the collection, most of which has recently been transferred to the Musiksammlung of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek. Granted virtually unrestricted access to the manuscripts, I was able to examine dozens of Salieri’s autograph scores and hundreds of performance parts—the process that laid the groundwork for my editions of Salieri’s masses.

The Mass in D Minor, like the majority of Salieri’s liturgical compositions, survives in the composer’s autograph score and a set of performance parts copied under the composer’s supervision, along with one other manuscript derived from the autograph score—an ideal set of sources that spared me the uncertainty (not uncommon in church music of this period) of relying exclusively on individual performance parts prepared by anonymous copyists. In addition to the full score, the autograph material includes a separate organ score and a single part for the third and fourth trumpets. In the two-staff organ score, Salieri provided a much more extensive organ part than was customary in this period, including written-out realizations for the Kyrie, the Benedictus, and much of the Gloria, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei.

One unusual feature of this manuscript is that it contains three different settings of the Credo. Two of these survive in both the full score and the performance parts, while the third remains only as an outline of the outer voices in the organ score. My editorial challenge here was to determine the order in which these settings had been composed; to piece together the original order of the full score (some of the leaves and folios had been rearranged, resewn, and pasted out of the original order); to construct a hypothetical version of the incomplete movement and establish its relationship, if any, to the other two Credos; to identify the version that had been used in the Hofkapelle; and to consider Salieri’s possible reasons for writing three separate Credos. Based on my conclusions, this edition presents the one setting which Salieri intended as his final version, and which was the one heard in performance in the Hofkapelle.

The Mass in D Minor is the third of Salieri’s four orchestral masses. Evidence suggests that he composed each of his masses during a period of war, perhaps in anticipation of a special service marking a much-hoped-for victory and/or declaration of peace. Indeed, war plagued Austria throughout 1805, threatening Vienna directly when Napoleon took quarters in Schönbrunn Castle in November of that year. Salieri’s early biographer Ignaz von Mosel cites this mass as a product of “that fateful year,” along with settings of the “Miserere nostri, Domine” and “De profundis.” Yet the Mass in D Minor does not strike a temporal mood of impending doom. As with most minor-key masses of the eighteenth century, the opening minor mode soon gives way to major tonalities, with D minor returning only to underscore expressions of penitence and atonement. Rather, it is the eternal verities of the mass that Salieri dramatizes here, drawing on both traditional and fresh musical elements, applied with sensitivity to liturgical language and a view to the conservative musical preferences of the court. High points of the mass include a gentle, imploring Kyrie (without the four trumpets and timpani, which make a brilliant entry at the beginning of the Gloria); a stirring Sanctus that powerfully evokes the awesome mystery of the Old Testament Deity; flowing contrapuntal endings to the Gloria and Credo; and a double fugue in the “Dona nobis pacem” that brings the mass to the solemn conclusion that Salieri preferred. Scored for the official instrumental ensemble of the court, whose wind section (oboes, bassoons, and trumpets,  with trombones doubling the alto and tenor voices) was more Baroque than Classical, the mass features several orchestral interludes for woodwind quartet as well as lyrical writing for solo oboe.

During my lengthy editorial work on the Mass in D Minor, I found inspiration by recalling that Salieri was one of the most influential composers of his time, the Hofkapellmeister whose 36-year tenure in that post was the longest since the establishment of the court ensemble by Emperor Maximilian I in 1498, and who bequeathed a lasting legacy to that institution through his students who held leading offices in the Hofkapelle well into the nineteenth century. I hope that this edition will help to secure and define Salieri’s place in the history of sacred music. Ultimately, that will be for performers and listeners to decide.