The Mass.
Secularization of the Mass.
Transferred from the Church to the concert-room, and considered as an art-form instead of the eucharistic office, the Mass has always made a strong appeal to composers, and half a dozen masterpieces of missal composition hold places in the concert lists of the singing societies. Notable among these are the Requiems of Mozart, Berlioz, and Verdi, and the Solemn Mass in D by Beethoven. These works represent at one and the same time the climax of accomplishment in the musical treatment and the secularization of the missal text. They are the natural outcome of the expansion of the office by the introduction of the orchestra into the Church, the departure from the a capella style of writing, which could not be consorted with the orchestra, and the growth of a desire to enhance the pomp of great occasions in the Church by the production of masses specially composed for them. Under such circumstances the devotional purpose of the mass was lost in the artistic, and composers gave free reign to their powers, for which they found an ample stimulus in the missal text.
Sentimental masses.
Mozart and the Mass.
The masses for the dead.
Gossec's Requiem.
The first effect, and the one which largely justifies the adherents of the old ecclesiastical style in their crusade against the Catholic Church music of to-day, was to make the masses sentimental and operatic. So little regard was had for the sentiment of the words, so little respect for the solemnity of the sacrament, that more than a century ago Mozart (whose masses are far from being models of religious expression) could say to Cantor Doles of a Gloria which the latter showed him, "S'ist ja alles nix," and immediately sing the music to "Hol's der Geier, das geht flink!" which words, he said, went better. The liberty begotten by this license, though it tended to ruin the mass, considered strictly as a liturgical service, developed it musically. The masses for the dead were among the earliest to feel the spirit of the time, for in the sequence, Dies iræ, they contained the dramatic element which the solemn mass lacked. The Kyrie, Credo, Gloria, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei are purely lyrical, and though the evolutionary movement ended in Beethoven conceiving certain portions (notably the Agnus Dei) in a dramatic sense, it was but natural that so far as tradition fixed the disposition and formal style of the various parts, it should not be disturbed. At an early date the composers began to put forth their powers of description in the Dies iræ, however, and there is extant in a French mass an amusing example of the length to which tone-painting in this music was carried by them. Gossec wrote a Requiem on the death of Mirabeau which became famous. The words, Quantus tremor est futurus, he set so that on each syllable there were repetitions, staccato, of a single tone, thus:
