Mass for double choir a cappella

Messe pour double choeur a cappella

Between age-old tradition and a more contemporary idiom

The popular Mass for double choir was consigned to a drawer for some forty years. Why did Frank Martin keep this work to himself for so long? Things he said over the years give us some hints and cast light on his changing attitude towards religious music. His setting of the Mass is a celebration of compositional freedom.

If it had been up to Frank Martin, his Mass for double choir would never have reached the ears of audiences at large. For decades he considered this composition, dating from 1922-1926, as a private matter, or more precisely, as something between God and himself, which partly explains why he made no effort at all to have it performed. It was not until 1963 that the work was premiered, after a Hamburg choral conductor had requested a copy of the manuscript “for study purposes”. The person in question, Franz Brunnert, wasted no time in performing the piece with his Bugenhagen choir, and others followed: after it was sung by the NCRV Vocal Ensemble in 1970 (a Dutch radio choir based in Hilversum, nearby Martin’s abode in Naarden), the composer finally agreed to its publication.

‘Instinctive modesty’
The existence of the manuscript had been known for long. The composer refered to the Mass for double choir during a lecture in Basel in 1946, also mentioning another early and likewise hidden work on a religious text, the unfinished Cantate sur la Nativité dating from 1929. He said of the two pieces: “Through a sort of instinctive modesty I have done nothing to have these pieces performed. It sufficed me entirely to have written them (…)”.

In the same lecture Frank Martin went on to say that he had been afraid that performance would be detrimental to “the expression of very intimate feelings”. He was particularly wary of drawing attention to his own person in this manner. The only acceptable performance would have been “in a church, without the author’s name and as part of the liturgy”.

Besides humbleness there was apparently a personal reason for Martin’s lasting “modesty” regarding sacred music. Towards the end of his life he confided to the Zodiaque journal that he had for a long time been unable to fathom his own religious feelings. He had first to come to terms in his own way with the faith that he had been brought up with as the son of a Calvinist minister. He had always sensed a religious feeling, he said, but he had felt obliged to himself “to momentarily suppress its intellectual expression”. Composition of the Mass enabled him to connect once again with religion and express the faith within him.

The finest memories
Martin’s prolonged reticence with regard to religious music disappeared once and for all in 1944, when he was commissioned by Radio Geneva to write a cantata relating to the impending armistice. The solemnity of the occasion, he believed, made a religious subject imperative. The ‘short oratorio’ In terra pax was premiered on 7 May 1945. Thus the ban was broken. Freed from his restraints, Frank Martin occasionally went on to write religious pieces for performance and publication, the most familiar example of which is the passion oratorio Golgotha (1948).

In composing sacred music, Martin continued to struggle to reconcile his own artistic ideals with the presumed expectations of the public. An ideal solution was to compose without a commission. In responding to an inner urge to commence Golgotha, for example, a public performance was not anticipated. The hard work he put into this oratorio – on his own conditions – was to remain one of the finest memories in his life.

Subtle balance
A similarly high degree of compositional freedom is evident in the Mass for double choir. A first reason for this is that in the 1920s Frank Martin had not yet established his own musical language (which he claimed to have achieved much later in the secular oratorio Le vin herbé dating, from 1938-1941). In the Mass, therefore, all compositional-technical options lay wide open. A second reason is that originality was not a prerequisite, since the work was intended only for God and himself, and public opinion did not matter. Characteristic of the Mass is the pursuit of a subtle balance between age-old tradition and a more contemporary idiom.

One’s first impression of the Mass for double choir is of a hommage to the vocal polyphony of the Renaissance. This is hardly surprising in view of the fact that many illustrious settings of the Mass – from Josquin to Palestrina – date from that period. The connection is made clear by Martin’s a cappella approach, the imitation technique, meticulous treatment of the text, and particularly the flowing movement without a metrical straitjacket. Besides such general features, occasional specific traits evoke the spirit of early music: half way through the Gloria Martin brings the music almost to a standstill, lending extra emphasis to the name of Jesus Christ.

Martin’s Mass also offers evidence of the great inspiration which he drew from Johann Sebastian Bach, so that the latter may in a certain sense be viewed as the conclusion – though more than a century later – of that same polyphonic Renaissance tradition. The youthful Frank Martin underwent a transformative experience when, at the age of twelve, he was enthralled upon hearing Bach’s St Matthew Passion for the very first time.

At the end of Martin’s Gloria there is a particular reference to Bach, when at the words ‘Patris’ and ‘Amen’ the two soprano voices abandon themselves in turn to the rapid notes of an ecstatic, rotating melody. This rhetorical figure, known as circulatio, was frequently employed in German Baroque music to depict everlasting life and the power of the Holy Spirit. In a similar fashion, the bitter motif in the Credo at the word ‘Crucifixus’ is strongly reminiscent of Bach; all voices subsequently descend symbolically to their lowest range at the words ‘et sepultus est’ (and [Jesus Christ] was buried), just as in the B Minor Mass.

Expressive invention
The melodic lines of Martin’s Mass deserve special mention. A general feeling of modality even suggests the influence of Gregorian chant (of which he probably widened his knowledge during a period of study in Rome in 1921). But certain chromatic turns of phrase nevertheless unmistakably belong to more recent times. Already in bar 10 of the Kyrie, the shift in the second alto from E to E flat has an undermining effect. Such an apparently innocent detail is comparable to the unexpected C sharp in the cellos by which Beethoven, at the beginning of the Eroica Symphony, makes it immediately clear that he intends to emerge from the shadow of Haydn and Mozart.

Following this local ‘lapse’ at the beginning of the Kyrie, in the Gloria in particular Frank Martin demonstrates that the Mass for double choir is solidly anchored in the twentieth century. The subdued opening of this hymn of praise, combined with an accumulation of intervals of the second in the first three entries of the second choir (B in the tenor, C sharp in the alto, D in the soprano) makes a somewhat recalcitrant impression. A little later, in the extensive Domine Deus section, there is a striking passage in which Martin has the second choir maintain an archaic sounding open fifth, while the first choir heightens the tension with a unison melody; the latter, near the climax at ‘Qui sedes’, makes way for two- and then four-part writing. A similar distribution of roles occurs later in the Benedictus and at the opening of the Agnus Dei. Such expressive invention makes the Mass especially attractive for singers and listeners alike, as does the introduction of a pentatonic scale to emphasise the exuberant joy of the faithful at the Resurrection (‘et resurrexit’ in the Credo).

Although this early composition is essentially different from the works of his more mature period, in 1922 the perfectionist Frank Martin must have found some satisfaction in the Mass, though it was as yet incomplete. It would otherwise be difficult to explain that, four years later, he added the Agnus Dei in a style that precisely corresponds with the earlier movements.

The belated success of the Mass for double choir is inseparably related to the sincere attitude which lies at its basis. Martin’s quest for musical means to lend renewed form to his own faith found resonance in the text of the Ordinary. As he put it himself in the journal Zodiaque: “what attracted me to the Mass, like so many other musicians too, was first the text and also the form, which in itself is admirable, both aesthetically and psychologically”. Without external constraint, and therefore without the obligation to be original, he was able to create a setting of this text which hovers between a bygone age and the world of his own time.

Frank Martin was convinced that the foremost mission of the artist is to bestow beauty upon humanity. To this end he believed it was neither necessary or desirable to lend expression to the spirit of the time. His enduring Mass was the fulfilment of his self-imposed requirements.

References:

Martin 1975    “Entretiens avec Frank Martin” [without the author’s name], Zodiaque 25 no. 103 (January 1975), pp. 7-28.
Martin 1977    Frank Martin, Un compositeur médite sur son art: Ecrits et pensées recueillis par sa femme. Neuchâtel, Editions de la Baconnière, 1977.

Michel Khalifa
translated by Stephen Taylor

Composer’s note: Mass for Unaccompanied Double Choir

This mass, composed in 1922 (except for the Agnus Dei which dates from 1926), was a work of my own free will, without commission or remuneration. Indeed at that time I knew of no choral conductor who could be interested in it. I never submitted it to the Society of Swiss Musicians for performance at one of their annual events. In fact I had no desire to have it performed as I was afraid it would be judged on a purely aesthetic level. As far as I was concerned it was a matter between God and myself. The same was true later on for a Christmas oratorio. I felt that religious fervour should remain private and not be influenced by public opinion. So much so that this composition remained in a drawer for forty years, included as a formality in my list of works. It was there in 1962 that the conductor of the Bugenhagen-Kantorei in Hamburg, Mr. Franz W. Brunnert, saw it mentioned and asked me to send it to him for perusal. He and his choir gave the first performance in the autumn of 1963, 41 years after it was composed.

All the aforementioned shows clearly that, even though I wrote the mass for a large number of voices, it is music of an inward nature. My musical language has developed considerably since that period. There are some things in this work that I would no longer be able to write; there are also weaknesses that I would never repeat. (I would be guilty of others, who wouldn’t?). But there are also musical elements which are very close to me, such as the phrase « Et incarnatus est » that I had already used in the unpublished Christmas oratorio. It reappears almost identically in my oratorio Golgotha, enhancing the text « Comme il avait aimé les siens dans le monde, il les aima d’un suprême amour ».

Let us hope that conviction, youth and some beauty can still be appreciated in this mass that is almost half a century old.

Frank Martin
translated by Rachel Ann Morgan

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