Mass No. 5 in A-Flat Major

For all its myriad beauties, Schubert’s sacred music remains—along with his operas—among the most neglected facets of his output. Of his six Latin Masses, the first four are products of his precocious teenage years and follow the example of Mozart’s Salzburg Missae breves (short masses). Nos. 5 and 6, though, are fully realised mature works on a symphonic scale, displaying Schubert’s deepening expressive reach and his highly personal style of orchestration. The Mass in A-flat Major was composed over an uncharacteristically extended period of almost three years, from November 1819 to September 1822. At this time Schubert was considering possible career avenues, and the care he took over the Mass indicates that he might have pondered becoming a church musician. Additionally, in 1826 he revised the work and submitted it to the imperial Kapellmeister, Joseph Eybler, who dismissed it—and thus Schubert’s hopes of becoming Vice-Kapellmeister—on the grounds that it failed to meet the emperor’s conservative taste. The work’s harmonic and orchestral richness is established in the pastoral opening Kyrie, before the two largest movements: a Gloria of contrasting moods, culminating in a substantial, Handel-like fugue on the words “Cum Sancto Spiritu” (“With the Holy Spirit”); and a nobly intoned Credo that encloses a rapt setting of “Et incarnatus est” (“And was made incarnate”). The fervent Sanctus and pizzicato-accompanied Benedictus both give way to hunt-like “Osannas”, and the Agnus Dei brings the work to a hushed conclusion on the prayer “Dona nobis pacem”.