Exsultate, jubilate in F Major

Sprinkled among Mozart’s substantial output of sacred music is a handful of motets—usually compact works for solo voices, setting a text appropriate to the season. The best known of these is Exsultate, jubilate (“Exult, rejoice”), first performed in January 1773, 10 days before Mozart’s 17th birthday. The Mozarts were in Milan for the premiere of his opera Lucio Silla, in which the role of Cecilio was sung by Venanzio Rauzzini, a castrato (male soprano) whose voice had remained unbroken thanks to medical intervention in childhood. Exsultate was tailored to Rauzzini’s skills in both rapid coloratura and lyric singing, although for all the first aria’s agility and the second’s beauty, nothing tops the euphoric vocal acrobatics of the concluding “Alleluja”, where church and theatre collide. A few years later Mozart recast the work, replacing the buoyant sound of oboes with pastoral flutes and substituting its Trinity Sunday text with one more suitable for the Nativity season.