Luogo e data di registrazione		Haydn-Saal, Schloß Esterházy, Eisenstadt (Austria) - 19/21 June 1994
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Recording supervisor		Wolf Erichson
	Recording Engineers		Stephan Schellmann, Peter Laenger (Tritonus)
	Prima Edizione LP		-
	Prima Edizione CD		Sony / Vivarte - SK 66 255 - (1 CD) - durata 47' 44" - (p) 1995 - DDD
	Cover Art		Christus in der Vorhölle by Peter von Cornelius (1783-1867) - Photo: Archiv für Kunst und Geschichte, Berlin
	Note		-

A Mass of Contractions Prior to 1825, Schubert's forays into the field of the Latin Mass had been more or less conventional affairs, but in his sixth and final Mass, written during the last months of his life in 1828, he struck out in a totally novel direction in setting the Latin text to music. In none of his Masses, including the four early settings of 1814 to 1816, was he willing to exclude the idea of a wholly personal profession of faith in spite of his debt to traditional models, but opted instead for solutions that strike the modern listener as more than a little surprising and suggest a critical attitude to the articles of faith. Displays of mere magnificence (one thinks above all of the dense instrumental textures) were never an end in themselves even in the Mass in A flat major, which he wrote between 1819 and 1822, and revised in 1825. Although this last-named work (described by Schubert himself as his Missa solemnis) was also designed to impress the imperial court, where he hoped to obtain the position of deputy Kapellmeister, there is no denying the very real sense of consternation that Schubert must have felt when working out the musical material, while the emphasis given to certain textual details is utterly individual and far removed from the everyday practices of the period, at least as they affected sacred music. And yet, in the intensity of its expressive language, Schubert's final Mass leaves far behind it the narrow confines in which the composer had worked hitherto. The E flat major Mass is meant to inspire terror rather than prepare its listeners spiritually and, in keeping with tradition, put them in the right frame of mind for the Sacrifice of the Mass. In consequence, it deserves to take its place among those works which, dating from 1828, are rightly deemed to constitute the composer's musical legacy: the String Quintet, the Schwanengesang settings of poems by Rellstab, Heine and Seidl, and the last three piano sonatas. Schubert's own particular brand of piety soon found itself at odds with conventional religion as pontificated by the Church and as embodied, more especially, in the spiritual “exercises” performed at school. The practitioners of such exercises had little difficulty in accommodating Metternich's reactionary politics and the harsh censorship regulations enacted by his minions.We know from Schubert's own remarks that such practices invariably gave him pause for thought when setting religious texts. In the case of his settings of the Mass, he soon began retouching the text, albeit lightly, whenever he found it too specific: the three words in the Gloria, “suscipe deprecationem nostram” [receive our prayer], are found only in his early Masses; the words “credo [in...] unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam” (I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church] occur in none of them; and other passages in the Credo dealing with the father-son relationship are treated in a whole range of different ways. Such freedom, it has to be said, was certainly not unusual at this time and was not explicitly banned by the Church until Pope Leo XIII's 1894 encyclical, which, in the wake of attempts to reform church music, forbade the omission of individual words within the liturgical text and proscribed all other changes. Schubert introduced increasingly unconventional stresses in structuring the music, introducing various repetitions not sanctioned by the “Missale Romanum” and linking together sections of the text to produce particular emphases or, less frequently, to modify the meaning of the words. In the E flat major Mass this “theological” revisionism culminates in the repeated association of Christ's incarnation and the Cross, of Advent and Good Friday. Interlinked, these two aspects of Christology permeate the Mass from the opening Kyrie onwards. Anxious but prepared to wait, the Kyrie chorus addresses its plea for mercy to a Redeemer whose reign has yet to begin on earth and whose presence is still invisible. Interestingly, Schubert uses the same restless accompanying figure here as in Ellens Gesang III (better known as Ave Maria), the third of his settings of songs from Sir Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake, while the exclamation towards the end of the Kyrie, declaimed with the greatest violence and emphasis, resembles nothing so much as a question with its evasive modulation from E flat to G flat. Another question mark appears to hang over the Gloria, for all its fanfare-like brilliance. The tendency towards imperfect cadences ending on the mediant is found repeatedly throughout the “in excelsis” until the final affirmation of the “in excelsis Deo”. The sense of ambivalence continues in the fugal “Cum sancto Spiritu”. Its subject could scarcely be simpler, yet Schubert treats it in such a way that it acquires an element of uncertainty in the form of rich chromaticisms and repeated modifications in the strettos. The various surviving drafts of the fugue bear witness to Schubert's attempts to diversify these relationships. The passage as a whole creates the impression of a study apparently intended to prepare the way for the ending of the Credo (“et vitam venturi saeculi”), the different subject of which, stated three times in all, adds to the sense of Elysian variety. Before this fugal conclusion comes the “Et incarnatus est”,with its annunciation of Christ's incarnation,which Schubert entrusts to a trio of soloists comprising soprano and two tenors. In doing so, he evokes a scene of the subtlest kind such as is otherwise normally found only in operatic ensembles involving canonic devices. Together with the almost dance-like accompanying figures on the strings, the 12/8-metre suggests a siciliana far removed from Schuber's earlier settings of this section of the Mass and totally unlike the fortissimo outburst that occurs at this point in the A flat major Mass. Even before the soloists have completed their account of Christ's incarnation on earth,the choir enters with its “Crucifixus etiam pro nobis”, a dramatic entry which, once again, can be theologically justified: the Cross, as the apparent turning-point in all temporal happiness, is part of the life-affirming incarnation, which is nothing without this visualization - there is nothing before it and nothing after it. Twice the composer makes this connection unmistakably clear in the music. The sense of musical drama, with all its ambivalent tensions, is maintained throughout the work. The daring harmonic shifts of the Kyrie are taken over into the Sanctus (listen out, for example, for the progression E flat major - C flat minor - B minor) and suggest a sense of self-questioning and expectant lingering rather than triuinphant faith. In the Benedictus the four soloists and chorus, supported in turn by strings and winds, evoke a dream in the form of what seems to be an ideal future world. But the jubilation of the concluding "Hosanna" is in stark contrast to the cruciate symbolism of the Agnus Dei, a symbolism linked in turn to thematic reminiscences of the Credo. Through the musical immediacy of the emblematic language, with the sign of the Cross spelt out in the notes C - B - E flat - D, it soon becomes clear that the Cross must be seen not so much as a token of redemption than as a stigma of all the misfortunes brought down on the world by human beings and as a symbol of the shame that the crucified Christ took upon Himself. Schubert undoubtedly saw it as such, for only a few weeks after completing the Mass, he reused this characteristic four-note motif almost unchanged in Der Doppelgänger from Schwanengesang, the protagonist of which (“[...] a man stands there too and stares aloft, and wrings his hands in an access of grief [...]”) finds himself in a similarly hopeless situation. In the Agnus Dei of the E flat major Mass the sound of the nails of the Crucifixion merges with the ever more insistent cries of human sel-castigation. Only after the penitent sinner has admitted his guilt and failings does the plea for peace bring with it a possible solution. With his idiosyncratic setting of the “dona nobis pacem”, Schubert may well have given his all in this last of his sacred Masses. Werner Aderhold (Translation: © 1995 Stewart Spencer)