This may well be the most fully realised masterpiece of Baroque sacred music: an intoxicating work of choral beauty, filled with dazzling arias. The story behind the celebrated Mass in B minor is a fascinating one. Bach completed the work in Leipzig around 1748, just two years before his death, bringing together his Missa Brevis of 1733, a Kyrie and Gloria dedicated to the Elector of Saxony for the brilliant, Catholic court of Dresden, with various pieces he had already composed, including the Sanctus, dated Christmas 1724, as well as newly written movements. The result was what his son Carl Philipp Emanuel called the “Great Catholic Mass”. In a sense, it was a work conceived without any specific performance in mind: after fifty years devoted to cantatas and Passions, Bach may have sought to create his great summation of sacred music.

Published only in 1833, the complete work was almost certainly never performed during Bach’s lifetime. In the nineteenth century, however, it became a symbol of supreme compositional mastery; with the revival of Baroque music that followed, it went on to become an essential work of the German Baroque and of the universal repertoire, placed on the same exalted level as his St Matthew Passion.

Within Bach’s output, this great Latin Mass stands in striking contrast to the splendour of his Protestant Passions. The haunting sorrow of the Crucifixus, where every voice seems to mourn Christ, gives way to the exhilaration of the Resurrexit, with trumpets and timpani unleashed and carried along by the jubilant cries of the faithful. A musical testament to Bach, the Mass in B minor is now among his most frequently performed works. John Eliot Gardiner is its supreme champion, leading his Constellation Choir and Orchestra in a performance that creates an aesthetic shock across the centuries.

This program will be recorded on DVD for the Château de Versailles Spectacles label.

Coming soon

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