Mass in D Minor

Haydn’s third great Mass for the Esterházy family has two titles. In his personal catalogue, Haydn named the work Missa in angustiis—“Mass in Time of Fear”—referring to the continuing Napoleonic war. But from shortly after its first performance in September 1798, the new work was popularly known as the “Nelson Mass”, perhaps because martial overtones in the Mass were thought (erroneously) to refer to Nelson’s spectacular victory over the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile. In the opening “Kyrie” and remarkable “Benedictus”, the key of D minor signals an air of tension and anxiety, enhanced by low trumpet fanfares and stark organ chords. But despite these wartime associations, most of the Mass is jubilant in spirit. Overall, though, Haydn was more interested in structure than mood. In many ways this, and several of his other late masses, are the rightful heirs of his final London symphonies (1794-95). Large-scale mass settings were traditionally made up of lots of separate movements—arias, ensembles and choruses—each treating a verse or two of text, with nothing much to link them together. In the “Nelson Mass”, we hear Haydn the symphonist at work—joining everything up. The “Gloria” and “Credo” are really large symphonic structures, and in line with the democracy of symphonic scoring, the soloists no longer have their own self-contained arias and duets, but collaborate with each other and the chorus in ever-changing alliances.