Salieri: Mass in D Minor

After a career as a celebrated opera composer, Salieri turned his attention around 1800 to his work as kapellmeister of the Vienna imperial chapel and the composition of church music. His four orchestral masses and numerous graduals and offertories helped to establish an "official" style of sacred music that lived on during the nineteenth century through his successors in the office of kapellmeister. His third mass, the heretofore unpublished Mass in D Minor, is an expressive setting written for an important state occasion. It preserves and develops the features of the late-eighteenth-century mass favored by the Habsburg monarchs, stressing lyrical melody, vocal elegance, liturgical counterpoint, sensitive treatment of text, and traditional musical rhetoric.