“What a picture of a better world you have given us, Mozart!” – Franz Schubert

The world Mozart lived in was no more ideal than our own. Over the course of a year, the impetuous 27-year-old broke up with his girlfriend, eloped with her sister, angered his father, told off his boss, quit his job, left home and ended up facing debt and snobbery in imperial Vienna. Through it all he wrote some of the most beautiful music the world has ever heard. Music was his lifeline, his religion; church music, like opera, served as a channel for the dramatic expression that flowed out of him.

When his personal life settled down in 1782, he vowed to write a new Mass in gratitude – perhaps for his happy marriage, his wife’s recovery from illness, or his father’s forgiveness for his hasty wedding. When the young couple returned to Salzburg, Mozart brought the half-finished score with him. He may have been diverted by more lucrative projects, but in any event he never completed the piece. At the only performance in Mozart’s lifetime, at St. Peter’s in Salzburg in 1783, the missing sections were evidently filled in by plainsong chant or spoken prayer.

Mozart clearly had great plans for this Mass, treating each phrase of the liturgy as a movement of its own, and writing coloratura arias to show off his wife Constanze’s agile soprano voice. He applied his study of Handel and Bach to create intricate fugues and double chorus voicing, while the lean orchestral textures in the arias are like an elegant glass vase with the vocal line as the bouquet. Mozart’s experience as an opera composer led him to craft theatrically vivid music, such as the weeping violin motive beginning the Kyrie, while his symphonic skill enabled him to make thematic use of musical materials, such as the sweeping arpeggios that the chorus sings in the Kyrie and inverts in the Gloria.

Tonight’s performance intersperses the surviving portions of the Mass with another kind of spiritual music, by the English Romantic master Ralph Vaughan Williams. We conclude with the most substantial complete movement of Mozart’s Mass: its Gloria.

"I don't think that sitting down and thinking about great things ever produces a great work of art (at least I hope not, because I never do so.)" – Ralph Vaughan Williams

Vaughan Williams felt a deep affinity for Walt Whitman, using his poems in Dona Nobis Pacem, performed by MCC in 1994, and A Sea Symphony, which we last performed in 2001. His setting of Toward the Unknown Region originated as a friendly contest with Gustav Holst to see who could do the better job with the same text. By mutual agreement, Vaughan Williams won, and the piece launched his renown as a composer when he conducted the premiere in 1907. Whitman’s text beckons us on a journey of the daring soul, giving voice to the hope for a better world that Americans and Britons envisioned for the new century. After serving on the front lines in World War I, Vaughan Williams turned to more prayerful texts for a time.

Decades later, he was drawn to Shakespeare’s meditation on music from The Merchant of Venice.It’s surprising that more composers haven’t set the same lines; perhaps it took a connoisseur of English folk music and hymn tunes to make iambic pentameter work in four-quarter time. Vaughan Williams certainly succeeded. Serenade to Music was written for a celebratory concert in honor of a fellow conductor, and first performed by a choir of 16 voices in 1938. The composer’s wife recalled seeing Rachmaninoff, listening in the wings before playing his own Second Concerto, moved to tears at the performance. In recognition of this year’s 50th anniversary of Vaughan Williams’ death, “here will we sit and let the sounds of music creep in our ears.”