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Haydn’s Lord Nelson Mass

Of the many things I love about KSS, one of the best is the wide variety of music that we perform. I’m one of those conductors who, when asked what their favourite piece of music is, will say, “The one I’m working on right now.” At the moment, that one is the Lord Nelson Mass by Franz Joseph Haydn, this being the 200th anniversary of his death in 1809. Because we do such a wide variety of music in KSS and we perform only three subscription concerts a year, we can’t spend a lot of time in any one period or genre, much as we would sometimes like to. Therefore, I don’t often choose the more obscure repertoire that a period has to offer. I generally go for a work that has been performed many times over the centuries. There is usually a good reason why—the work is a stunning example of its kind, the type that repays deep forays and repeated visits with more and more insight, more and more gold.

To gain an understanding of a great piece of music, it helps to know a bit about the social backdrop at the time and the events that were part of the composer’s world. This is what I was doing for several hours yesterday. Written in the summer of 1798, Haydn’s title for this particular mass was “Missa in angustiis” or, “Mass in Times of Distress.” The times of distress were the Napoleonic wars with the four losses Austria suffered that year, including a threat on Vienna itself. (Haydn was living mostly in Vienna by this time.) With Napoleon invading Egypt to bring down England (by way of India), foreboding filled Austria.

This led me to wonder why Napoleon was doing all this (outside of his huge ego, of course), which led to a review of the French Revolution, a short side trip into the economic fall-out of a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland (aren’t links great?) on the way to an in-depth overview of the Enlightenment, which was at the heart of the thought and aspirations of the entire 18th century. (More on that later.)

Haydn, the composer who most consistently expressed the values of the Enlightenment, was at the peak of his compositional powers and had, surprisingly, ceased to write orchestral symphonies by this time. His last major works were for instruments and voices uniting powerfully to express text (masses and oratorios), written in a deeply troubled time, and informed by the full flowering of the Enlightenment.

I mean, how good does it get? My heart beats faster just thinking about the richness laying beneath all those notes. Our first rehearsal is tomorrow—it can’t come fast enough.

Karen