Missa Maria zart

Obrecht’s Missa Maria zart (Mass for Gentle Mary), the composer’s swansong, stands alone among his works for its complex melodic thought and extreme length (twice what was standard). Probably written during the early years of the 16th century, it takes its name and musical material from a devotional song (“Maria zart”) written in the Tyrol a few years earlier. The melody of that song is often heard in long, slow notes in one of the tenor parts, but Obrecht breaks it up and uses it as an endless source of new melodic motifs and sequential patterns, which are shared between all the voices—low alto, two tenors and bass. The unique sound world of the Mass is created both by Obrecht’s saturation of all the vocal parts with melodic ideas obsessively derived from the Tyrolean song, and by pushing all four voices to sing at the extremes of their registers.