Musical Form
Mass (Musical Setting)
A musical setting of the Catholic liturgy's fixed texts.
Choral
A Mass, in musical terms, is a setting of the fixed texts of the Catholic liturgy - the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei - for singers, with or without instrumental accompaniment. Because the words are essentially the same from setting to setting, the genre offers an unusually direct way to compare how composers across very different eras approached identical material.
The five parts
Composers generally set the Ordinary, the five texts that stay the same at every Mass, rather than the Proper, the readings and prayers that change with the church calendar - which is exactly why the same five-part structure recurs across centuries of otherwise very different musical settings:
- Kyrie - "Lord, have mercy," the only part in Greek rather than Latin.
- Gloria - "Glory to God in the highest," usually jubilant.
- Credo - the creed, the longest text, with its dramatic moments at the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.
- Sanctus and Benedictus - "Holy, holy, holy" and "Blessed is he who comes," often ending with a ringing "Hosanna."
- Agnus Dei - "Lamb of God," closing with a prayer for peace.
From chant to polyphony
Mass settings run from simple Medieval chant, sung in unison with no harmony at all, through elaborate Renaissance polyphony written for church choirs. Guillaume de Machaut's Messe de Nostre Dame (c. 1360s) is the earliest complete polyphonic setting by a single known composer.
In the Renaissance, the Mass was the most prestigious form a composer could write. Many settings were built on a borrowed melody running through every movement - a popular song called "L'homme armé" ("The Armed Man") was used for dozens of Masses. Palestrina's serene settings became the model for sacred polyphony, while in Protestant England, William Byrd wrote Masses for Catholics who had to worship in secret.
The concert Mass
From the Baroque onward, Masses grew into large-scale works with orchestra and vocal soloists, often effectively concert works rather than pieces intended for liturgical use. Bach's Mass in B Minor - written by a Lutheran, and never performed complete in his lifetime - is the supreme example. Haydn's late Masses, such as the "Nelson" Mass, and Mozart's "Coronation" Mass and Great Mass in C minor brought the symphonic style into church. Beethoven's Missa solemnis shows the ordinary Mass pushed to a monumental, symphonic scale.
One specialized branch deserves its own mention: the Requiem, a Mass for the dead that replaces some of the standard Ordinary texts with funeral-specific ones, became a major genre of its own by the Classical and Romantic eras.
Later Masses
In the 19th century, Rossini wrote a Petite messe solennelle, whose title is famously ironic: it's neither little nor especially solemn. In the 20th century, Stravinsky wrote a stark Mass for choir and winds, and Leonard Bernstein's MASS (1971) turned the form into a theater piece. After the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s allowed services in local languages, Latin Mass settings became rarer in church, but composers such as Arvo Pärt have kept the form alive.
Famous Masses
- Machaut - Messe de Nostre Dame (c. 1360s).
- Palestrina - Missa Papae Marcelli (1567).
- Bach - Mass in B minor (completed 1749).
- Haydn - "Nelson" Mass (1798).
- Beethoven - Missa solemnis (1823).
Where to start listening: Bach's Mass in B Minor is the form's most towering achievement; for something more austere, Palestrina's Renaissance Mass settings show the style at its purest. Then compare the Gloria of Haydn's "Nelson" Mass for the Classical era's bright, symphonic take.