Near the very end of his life, Bach decided to assemble and rework a number of earlier compositions – supplementing them with new material – into a complete setting of the Latin mass. No one knows quite why he undertook such a project, but it proved to be oddly prescient. Less than a century later, the mass had moved out of the chapel and into the concert hall, establishing itself as a viable genre of composition that occupied the uneasy middle ground between religious devotion and secular entertainment.
Although Bach intended much of the music in his Mass in B-minor to be performed in an ecclesial setting, the scope and duration of the work as a whole is perhaps better suited to a Friday evening than a Sunday morning; yet the question of how one should appreciate the Mass is something that every conductor must address. Is it…
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