Beethoven: Mass in C & Piano Concerto 3

Of few composers can it be said that through them, and them alone, the art of music became completely transformed.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) is such a composer. He represented a break with all the old concepts of what music should be and with the methods by which these concepts should be realized. Beauty of sound, balance and symmetry of structure, attractive lyricism for its own sake, even the expression of deeply felt emotion—all this is no longer that toward which Beethoven directed his means. He not only had to speak that which was in his heart; he also had to give voice to the beliefs and ideals that governed his life. He was a son of the Enlightenment. The new ideas of freedom and the rights of man sweeping across Europe, with Voltaire and Rousseau as their leading voices, sound loud and clear in Beethoven’s music. The world was aflame with the spirit of Revolution, its fires kindled in France. The “I”—the creative personality—was asserting itself more strongly than ever. “I must write,” Beethoven said, “for what weighs on my heart, I must express.” Everywhere in Europe, wherever genius spoke, such words were now being heard. 

Join the Ama Deus Ensemble at the Kimmel Center for a program of exciting, emotional and uplifting music of the master. Maestro Valentin Radu will play the Concerto No. 3 for Piano ("Empress"), the Ama Deus Ensemble orchestra and chorus will perform the wonderful Mass in C major, Op. 86 (Missa Brevis).

Mass in C (“Missa Brevis”), Op. 86

The Mass in C was composed in 1807 on a commission from Prince Nikolaus Esterházy II, the fourth and last of Haydn’s patrons from that eminent family.  The Prince had a special mass sung every year on the name-day of his wife.   To these occasions at Eisenstadt we owe Haydn’s greatest works in this genre, as well as several by Johann Nepomuk Hummel, who was in Esterházy’s employ
after 1804.  Beethoven’s Mass belongs, then, to the most prodigious period of the composer’s creativity.  Among other works composed at the time were the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies—all of which were performed, along with portions of the Mass, at Beethoven’s famous Akademie or benefit concert of December 1808.

Ama Deus Ensemble

Beethoven had never written a mass before, and it is interesting that he made no effort to match the “symphonic” grandeur of Haydn’s late masses.  On the contrary, he thought freshly about liturgical composition and contrived a style that in some ways was simpler, humbler, and more spiritual than the usual Viennese model.  “I think that I have treated the text in a manner in which it has rarely been treated,” Beethoven wrote—admittedly, to a publisher who was dragging his feet about contracting for the work.

So despite some very emphatic moments, matched to emphatic words in the mass text, Beethoven’s Mass in C is likely to impress us as an uncharacteristically quiet work, uncharacteristic at least in the world of the Fifth Symphony, the Coriolan Overture, and the mighty middle-period sonatas and string quartets.  The Mass was not a great success in its own time.  “But my dear Beethoven, what is this you have done now?” asked a puzzled Prince Esterházy after the service; and Hummel, standing by, is said to have smirked.

What was puzzling Esterházy?  Assuming it was something in the music he had just heard, namely the Agnus Dei movement, he would hardly have been surprised by the anguished, minor-mode “Agnus Dei… miserere nobis,” nor by the skillful da capo of the “Kyrie eleison” music at the very end of the “Dona nobis pacem” section.  Such features were familiar enough from other masses of the time.  But Esterházy may have been put off by the transition from those anguished misereres to the relieved, innocent accents of the “Dona”; he may even have been shocked.  For Beethoven simply elided the repetition of the phrase “Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi” that the liturgy prescribes in between “miserere nobis” and “dona nobis pacem.”  And after less than a minute of hopeful appeals for peace, which seem almost to evoke the world of Mozart’s Zauberflöte, explosive minor-mode misereres start up again after the “Dona” had begun and was expected to keep going without interruption to the end.

Some of Beethoven’s most striking effects in the Mass in C are unison octave passages for the chorus, which seem on these occasions to regress to plainchant.  Such passages occur at the words “Kyrie eleison” near the end of the Kyrie; at “Quoniam tu solus sanctus” in the Gloria—surely one of the most thrilling settings of these words in the whole history of the mass; at “Deum verum de Deo vero” and “sub Pontio Pilato” in the Credo; and twice, hauntingly, within the lengthy Benedictus.

Especially in the choral parts, Beethoven’s personal response to the mass text is evident and moving.  His setting of the words “Kyrie eleison” (Lord, have mercy), for example, repeatedly traces the same emotional pattern: a murmur leading to a quiet, expectant surge leading to a rather anxious plea. This emotional curve is experienced as many as six times before the Kyrie movement finally subsides.

Finally, it may be noted that the Mass in C is one of many works by Beethoven in which the key of C minor symbolizes trouble and C major symbolizes relief.  C minor cedes to C major twice in the Agnus Dei, as the anguished misereres give way to the hopeful “Dona nobis pacem.” Earlier in the piece, we have heard the same anguish-to-relief sequence, in the same keys, and even with similar
cadenza-like passages in the woodwinds, in the transition from the same words (“…miserere nobis”) in the Gloria to the resounding “Quoniam tu solus sanctus.”

Coriolan Overture, Op.62

Shakespeare's Coriolanus was not the direct inspiration for Beethoven's overture of the same name; instead, the work was written to accompany Heinrich Joseph von Collin's all-but-forgotten drama Coriolan, which was revived in Vienna's Burgtheater in 1807. Beethoven's music depicts the story of Coriolanus in an often stormy essay whose evolution mirrors the action in the drama.

In the drama, Coriolanus is a Roman patrician who has been banished from his native city as a result of his lack of concern for the starving people there. After taking up with the Volscians and plotting revenge, the proud and disgraced Coriolanus leads their armies against Rome. Upon reaching the border of his former city, he is approached by emissaries who plead with him to abandon his intentions to invade. Coriolanus, who has long waited for the day on which he will finally avenge his eviction and humiliation, sends them away and prepares for attack. A last effort to save Rome comes when his mother and his wife plead with him to desist. He is at last dissuaded from carrying out his plans, realizing they are now abhorrent to him. In Collin's play, he determines that he must regain his honor, which can only be effected by death at his own hand.

The Coriolan Overture is one of the most frequently performed and recorded of Beethoven's orchestral works. It was premiered in March 1807 and first published in Vienna in the following year.

Piano Concerto No. 3 in Cminor, Op.37

Beethoven composed this work in 1799-1800, and introduced it at Vienna on April 5, 1803. The first sketches go back to 1797—after he'd composed the B flat Piano Concerto (published as No. 2), but before composition of the C major Concerto (in 1798, published as No. 1). Although Beethoven played the first performance of No. 3 in 1803 from a short score—no one was going to steal it from him!—he'd actually completed the music prior to April 1800, apart from a few last-minute adjustments. In other words, before he wrote the Second Symphony (Op. 36), the Moonlight Piano Sonata (Op. 27/2), or the Op. 31 triptych for keyboard.


The model for this startlingly dramatic concerto was Mozart's C minor (K. 491), which Beethoven played in public concerts. But "model" does not mean he merely imitated; indeed, the orchestra's traditional first exposition is so extensively developed that the soloist's repetition risks sounding anticlimactic. Otherwise, as Charles Rosen has written with formidable insight in The Classical Style, "There are many passages in the first movement, Allegro con brio, which allude to Mozart's concerto in the same key...particularly the role of the piano after the cadenza. But the striking development section, with [a] new melody half-recitative [and] half-aria, is entirely original, as is the new sense of weight to the form." Beethoven wrote down that cadenza several years later, to preserve the work's
character and momentum, when implacable deafness seriously disadvantaged his public appearances at the keyboard.

Beethoven's autograph of the cadenza (pages 2 and 3)

To his contemporaries the slow movement came—and can still come—as a shock. Not only did he mark it Largo (which is to say very slowly), in 3/8 time, but chose the remote key of E major (four sharps, vs. C minor's three flats). Alone, the piano leads off for 11 measures, introducing both the main theme and ornamentation that accompanies it throughout.

Characteristically, the finale is a Rondo Allegro, again in tonic C minor, with a pair of principal themes introduced by the soloist. This movement is rich in humor yet also dramatic, with a passage midway in E major to remind us where we've been. Following another (but brief) cadenza, Beethoven switches to C major, accelerates the tempo to presto, and gives the orchestra the last word.