Mass in B minor

• 1. Introduction

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  The Mass in B minor, BWV 232, took Johann Sebastian Bach more than two decades to complete. He began it in 1733 with a political motive and finished it in the final years of his life, blind, assembling the last movements as his handwriting grew stiff and labored. The result runs for around two hours in performance, calls for five soloists, two choirs, and a Baroque orchestra bristling with brass and wind instruments. It was never performed in its entirety while Bach was alive. The first complete public performance did not happen until 1859, a full century after his death. Yet today it stands among his most popular vocal works, with over 350 complete recordings catalogued as of 2022. What made Bach write a full Latin Mass, a form rarely heard in Lutheran Germany? Why did he spend his final years gathering older compositions into this monument? And why did it take the world a hundred years to hear what he had made?

• 2. A Petition in Music

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  On the 1st of February 1733, Augustus II the Strong, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, died. A five-month period of public mourning followed, and during that time all public music-making was suspended in Saxony. Bach, then working in Leipzig, used the silence to compose a Missa, a setting of the Kyrie and Gloria that was common to both Lutheran and Catholic worship. His motive was practical. The new sovereign, Augustus III, had converted to Catholicism, and Bach wanted a court title in Dresden. He visited the new elector in person and handed over a set of parts for the Kyrie-Gloria Mass, along with a petition dated the 27th of July, 1733. In the inscription on the wrapper, Bach wrote that he had "innocently suffered one injury or another" in Leipzig. The petition did not succeed immediately. Bach was eventually named court composer to Augustus III in 1736, three years after presenting the Mass.

• 3. A Work Built from Borrowed Pieces

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  Of the Mass's 27 movements, specific earlier sources can be pinpointed for at least eleven, with scholars suspecting even more borrowing beneath the surface. The Crucifixus draws on music Bach first composed in 1714 for the cantata Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, BWV 12. The Gratias agimus tibi is a reworking of a movement from his 1731 Town Council Inauguration cantata, BWV 29. The Agnus Dei reaches back further, to a lost wedding serenade from 1725. Transplanting music from one context to another was common in Bach's era, and scholars note that Bach likely saw it as a way of preserving his finest vocal writing in the longer-lasting format of the Latin Ordinary, rather than in church cantatas tied to specific Sundays. John Butt notes that the concept of parody, adapting existing vocal music to new texts, only seemed unfavourable through a later musical aesthetic. Only the opening four bars of the first Kyrie, the Et incarnatus est, and the Confiteor stand as movements without a known or suspected earlier model.

• 4. The Final Assembly

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  Yoshitake Kobayashi dated the Symbolum Nicenum section to August through October of 1748 by studying the increasingly stiff quality of Bach's handwriting in the manuscript. Christoph Wolff and other scholars place the completion of the full work in 1748-49. The movement Bach likely wrote last was the Et incarnatus est: the words had originally been part of the preceding duet, but Bach pulled them out and gave them to the full choir, adding weight and improving the symmetry of the Credo as a whole. John Butt argues that a firm final date of the 25th of August, 1749, can be assigned, because on that date Bach's son Carl Philipp Emanuel completed a Magnificat whose closing Amen chorus shows distinct similarities to movements in the Mass. C. P. E. Bach himself reported that he performed this Magnificat in Leipzig in 1749, during his father's lifetime. Bach organized the finished work into four folders, each with its own title. He placed his usual closing formula, S.D.G., the abbreviation for Soli Deo Gloria, only at the very end of the final movement, the Dona Nobis Pacem.

• 5. A Title Nobody Gave It

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  Bach did not give the Mass a single name. The four folders he assembled carried separate headings: "1. Missa", "2. Symbolum Nicenum", "3. Sanctus", and "4. Osanna, Benedictus, Agnus Dei et Dona nobis pacem". After his death, the score passed to C. P. E. Bach, and by 1790 the estate inventory listed it as "Die Grosse Catholische Messe", the Great Catholic Mass. The same phrase appeared again in the estate of C. P. E. Bach's last heir in 1805, suggesting to scholar George Stauffer that it reflected an oral tradition within the Bach family. The Swiss collector Hans Georg Nageli published the Kyrie and Gloria in 1833 through Simrock; the first complete publication in 1845, also from Nageli and Simrock, called it the "High Mass in B Minor". The adjective "high", John Butt argues, was strongly influenced by the impression made by Beethoven's Missa solemnis. That word faded from use, but "in B Minor" survived, even though the key is somewhat misleading: only five of the work's 27 movements are actually in B minor, while twelve are in D major.

• 6. The Long Road to Performance

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  Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach gave the first public performance of any section of the complete work in Spring of 1786, presenting the Symbolum Nicenum at a benefit concert for the Medical Institute for the Poor in Hamburg, 36 years after his father's death. The first public performance in the nineteenth century came in Frankfurt in March 1828, featuring only the Credo, with over 200 performers and many additional instruments. In the same year, Gaspare Spontini led the Credo in Berlin, adding 15 new choral parts and numerous instruments of his own. The first fully attested public performance of the complete Mass came in 1859 in Leipzig, led by Karl Riedel and the Riedel-Verein. The Bach Choir gave the first UK performance in 1876 at St James's Hall in London, the ensemble having been newly formed for that specific purpose by conductor Otto Goldschmidt. The American premiere of the complete work took place on the 27th of March, 1900, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, performed by the Bach Choir of Bethlehem, although parts of the Mass had reached American audiences as early as 1870.

• 7. Scholarship, Editions, and Disagreements

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  Two autograph sources survive. The first is the set of parts for the Kyrie and Gloria that Bach deposited in Dresden in 1733. The second is the score of the complete work compiled in 1748-50, now held at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, whose handwritten manuscript was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World International Register in 2015. C. P. E. Bach's 1786 performance added a 28-bar introduction, replaced the oboe d'amore with newer instruments, and made other changes; he also wrote in solutions to passages made nearly illegible by his father's failing eyesight. Those interventions have complicated editorial work ever since. The Bach Gesellschaft edition, edited by Julius Rietz and published in 1856, lacked direct access to the autograph. When access was obtained, a revised edition appeared the following year, but it was later found to be even less accurate than its predecessor because it inadvertently incorporated C. P. E. Bach's alterations. Friedrich Smend's 1954 edition for the Neue Bach-Ausgabe was shown to have significant faults within five years of publication. Christoph Wolff's 1997 edition, published by C. F. Peters, used two copies of the 1748-50 manuscript made before C. P. E. Bach's additions. Uwe Wolf's 2010 edition, published by Barenreiter, brought x-ray spectrograph technology to bear, using it to distinguish J. S. Bach's handwriting from later additions.

• 8. What the Scholars Say

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  Alberto Basso described the Mass in B minor as "the consecration of a whole life: started in 1733 for 'diplomatic' reasons, it was finished in the very last years of Bach's life, when he had already gone blind." Christoph Wolff wrote that the work represents "a summary of his writing for voice, not only in its variety of styles, compositional devices, and range of sonorities, but also in its high level of technical polish." Scholars have grouped it with The Art of Fugue as one of Bach's great encyclopedic late projects, works that display the full range of his craft. The 19th-century collector Nageli called it "The Announcement of the Greatest Musical Work of All Times and All People". Forkel and Haydn both possessed copies by the early 19th century. The Mass has sat at the center of the historical performance movement; Nikolaus Harnoncourt made the first recording using period instruments in 1968. Joshua Rifkin, who argues for one voice per vocal part, made his first recording in 1982 and won a 1983 Gramophone Award for it. On the 4th of October, 2025, in Kokkola, Finland, the complete Mass was used for the first time as an actual liturgical setting for a Mass service, a three-hour event that closed a gap of nearly three centuries between the work and the purpose it was nominally written to serve.