On Haydn's Lord Nelson Mass and Pärt's Fratres

As performers and lovers of music, we can never predict how real-world events will shape the music we perform and the music we hear. As much as music helps us transcend our here and now, there are certain times when it’s impossible to perform in a vacuum and ignore the way the music resonates with life, echoing and amplifying the joys and struggles our world presents. That’s the agony and the ecstasy of live music. At my first concert with Princeton Pro Musica, we stepped searchingly through the ominous gray opening of Mozart’s Requiem as the turbulent clouds and swells of Hurricane Sandy rolled toward our shores. Two years later, the resplendent fanfares that close Bach’s Christmas Oratorio resounded in joyous tribute to the life of Bach scholar and music supporter William Scheide. Just a week before I wrote this essay, Princeton Pro Musica lost one of its greatest friends and champions, alto Lockie Proctor, and we lifted up these pieces in honor of her boisterous spirit.

I’d long been eager to explore the choral masterworks of Haydn, and his six great late masses in particular. I finally did in November 2016. That fall was a time of distress for some, and, I had hoped, a time of discernment for all. I chose the Missa in angustiis (“Mass in a Time of Distress”) first and foremost because of its astoundingly good music. But that fall there was something about the music that spoke to both my anxious premonition about the looming national moment and the hope I felt for the future. We gave the concert just two days before the 2016 election, with my anxiety and hopefulness intensified beyond anything I could have anticipated. Haydn’s score felt more alive than ever.

Between 1796 and 1802, Josef Franz Haydn composed six masses on a grand scale for the annual name-day celebration of Princess Marie, the wife of his patron Prince Nicholas II. Haydn wrote these works, along with his large-scale oratorios The Creation and The Seasons, after his famed visits to London. There he had expanded and perfected his symphonic style, and the grand, ceremonious music of Handel had made a lasting impression on him. The first his masses, 1796’s Missa in Tempore Belli (“Mass in a Time of War”), acknowledged the reality of the Napoleonic Wars throughout Europe and North Africa. Two years later, the Wars still grinding on, Haydn penned his only mass in a minor key, the Missa in Angustiis (“Mass in a Time of Distress”).

The Missa in Angustiis stands apart from the other late masses in its use of instrumentation, texture, and other musical parameters to pit angsty urgency against jubilant assurance and joy. It also delineates part from whole and individual from community. In his original scoring Haydn eschews the wind instruments of the orchestra altogether, leaving the strings with just an organ, three trumpets, and timpani. The stark contrast in timbres sharpens the martial blare and beat of the brass and drums. The pointed trumpet fanfares and pleading sighs of the chorus in the opening Kyrie, and the almost menacing advance of the trumpets and timpani in the Benedictus, are as severe as any music written up to that time. From the strings, Haydn coaxes both sweet, limpid lyricism and fiery, surging passagework.

The famously acrobatic, impassioned soprano solo in the opening movement gives individual voice to the predominant sense of anxiety, crying high above the storm of the strings and trumpets. The four sections of the chorus enter one on top of another, piling up dissonances through insistent repetitions of the plea “Have mercy on us.” Elsewhere, such as at the end of the Gloria and in the final Dona Nobis Pacem, Haydn uses fugues and fugal techniques, where one musical idea is presented in each of the four voice parts, altered ever so slightly so that they overlap harmoniously, cooperatively. In the first of the movements setting the Credo text (the mass’s group statement of belief) all voices sing the same music: The sopranos and tenors sing exactly the same line throughout, an octave apart; The altos and basses follow a measure behind and a fifth below. A single line of music, refracted through the laws of counterpoint and harmony, creates a sparkling, colorful whole. Out of one strong idea Haydn makes many. Later, in the midst of a fiery Et Resurrexit, he does the opposite, uniting the many vocal parts into one unison declaration.

Princeton Pro Musica is no stranger to the music of Arvo Pärt. I designed the program for which this essay was written around Haydn’s “Mass in a Time of Distress,” which opens with a tempest of strings and trumpets. Something about Arvo Pärt’s Fratres, in its version for violin solo, string orchestra, and percussion, captures the same stormy, stringy anxiety, using Pärt’s one-of-a-kind musical language, which he calls “tintinnabuli.” Pärt’s first works in the tintinnabuli style appeared in 1976, and Fratres was first performed in 1977. Pärt has created many different versions of Fratres, and I chose the version with solo violin playing a set of variations atop the two layers of the string orchestra, because it teems with subjectivity, like the soprano solo in the Haydn. It opens with the solo violinist outlining the repetitive harmonic structure of the piece through a flurry of impossibly quick arpeggios (her bow skitters across twenty-four notes in a single beat). The upper strings repeat the harmonic pattern, but in calm, dulcet bow strokes. The solo violin then abandons the arpeggios to rejoin the upper strings with feathery, fluty harmonics. There follows a tour de force of violin technique—arpeggios, double stops, harmonics—as the solo line explores and reconciles with the underlying harmonic pattern of the piece.

The constant drone in the cellos and basses, unwavering as the passage of time, creates a sonic backdrop that the harmonies of the upper strings push against and then meld back into. Pärt’s tintinnabuli technique pits the stable notes of a triad against a freer melodic line. In some compositions those two elements combine in a consonant way, but in Fratres, the melodic line introduces B-flat and C-sharp—two notes a mere half step away from the A and C of the stable A-minor triad. We hear, over and over again, uneasy motion among the voices, between C-sharp and C-natural. The B-flat to C-sharp shift that gives the D-harmonic minor of the Haydn’s first movement its edginess, in Pärt’s hands distributes the sense of struggle over the entire span of the piece. His music embodies our human struggle, over the passage of time, between our more earthly and more spiritual selves. Conductor and Pärt biographer, Paul Hillier, shares some insights from a conversation with the composer: “Pärt described to me his view that the melodic line always signifies the subjective world, the daily egoistic life of sin and suffering; the tintinnabuli voice, meanwhile, is the objective realm of forgiveness. The melodic line may appear to wander, but it is always held firmly by the tintinnabuli line. This can be likened to the eternal dualism of the body and spirit, earth and heaven; but the two lines are in reality one line, a twofold single entity.”

In the summer of 1798, as in so many others, political divisions and warfare brought distress around the globe. Then, news traveled slowly; now, it saturates our screens instantaneously. In the runup to the 2016 election we had to confront our base inclinations but, I hope, have also been inspired to appeal to our better angels. If you came to the concert today to escape the punishing din of the outside world, I hope you are lifted by the unfettered joy of Haydn’s Dona Nobis Pacem and calmed by the tranquility of Brahms’ Geistliches Lied. If you came here today with a mind as storm-tossed and dissonant as Haydn’s Kyrie, I hope this music helps you find a clear path forward. Theoretically, at least, it presents avenues for reconciliation and reminds us that the counterpoint between different elements, when organized through harmony, makes the most satisfying whole. But it’s not the technicalities of the music—or even its sound—that matter most: It’s the community music can build. Your presence at a concert signals your willingness to pause and listen—to enfold yourself in a shared moment of musical communication. It’s a beautiful way of reminding ourselves that, no matter what happens in hotly contested elections, we will still live under one national motto: e pluribus unum—out of many, one. Let’s keep listening.