PROGRAMME NOTES
Speedread Everybody loves a hero, particularly when he or she is up against a particularly dastardly foe. They don’t come much more dastardly than Napoleon, and they don’t come much more heroic than Lord Nelson. Though Haydn’s 1798 Mass carries the Admiral’s name, the composer had no idea Napoleon’s fleet was being routed by Nelson as his pen traversed his paper. Perhaps, then, we’d better think of the real hero of the Nelson Mass as Haydn himself – a man who worked with a quiet dedication and craft for 30 years before being pushed into accepting fame and glory, and who even within the constraints of economics (and with a proportion of his orchestra missing) managed to write a piece so uncompromisingly brilliant as this.
Joseph Haydn 1732–1809
Sarah-Jane Brandon soprano Sarah Connolly mezzo-soprano Robin Tritschler tenor Hanno Müller-Brachmann bass-baritone London Philharmonic Choir The text begins on page 11. The last period of Joseph Haydn’s career must have felt as disorientating as it did liberating. To rewind five years, in 1790 Haydn had found himself effectively dismissed from a job he’d been doing for some three decades: providing and playing music for a family of aristocrats outside Vienna. With his new-found freedom he’d taken the opportunity to travel – making two staggeringly successful trips to London – but by 1795 he was in Austria-Hungary again and with his old job back. The
Uncompromising brilliance is something Richard Strauss knew how to conjure, and unlike Joseph Haydn he’d probably have used the words to describe himself without the hint of a blush. He did as much, too, in his musical autobiography Ein Heldenleben (‘A Hero’s Life’), written 100 years after Haydn’s Mass. Perhaps that’s a little unfair on the young and ambitious Strauss, though. There’s something slightly ironic about Ein Heldenleben, and its composer meant it that way. Besides, Strauss did change as his life progressed, and he predicted as much in the piece’s music. It begins with heroic exhibitionism, scattering adversaries with panache. But it finishes in a place of peace; fulfilled, contented and disarmingly noble.
Missa in Angustiis (Nelson Mass), Hob. XXII/11 I Kyrie II Gloria III Credo IV Sanctus V Benedictus VI Agnus Dei
only difference being, the grand musical establishment he’d once had under his command no longer existed. Haydn had a fraction of the responsibility, but nearly a doubling of the salary (with the professional respect he’d found so elusive thrown in, too). His responsibilities, in fact, began and ended with the writing of a Mass each September to celebrate the name day of the family princess. He duly did this for six years on the trot, writing six great Masses that are some of the finest works that carry his name. The Masses built on the direct, dramatic symphonies Haydn had written for London and seemed to turn on new, symphonic hinges that aided both their coherence and their flow. It wasn’t all freedom, celebration and musicological advance, however, hence the subtitle Haydn gave the third of his six Masses, Missa ‘in angustiis’, (‘in
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