Messe in h-moll (BWV 232) - 09. Gloria (Chorus - Qui tollis peccata mundi) [La Petite Bande, Gustav Leonhardt]
A man well versed in tragedy, having lost his parents by the age of ten, then his wife and ten children of his own, Bach never succumbed to cynicism. His darkness is deep yet gentle, sad yet sweet. A retooling of the first movement of a cantata (bwv 46) that he wrote 25 years earlier, the Qui Tollis of the Bm Mass could have been composed at any time in the last 300 years. (Which of Mozart's operas is not timestamped?) It is distinctive by the anxious throbbing pulses of the bass line with the viola playing two-note successions. Beginning at the 8th bar (0:25), the flutes come in to relieve the weight of perpetually falling thirds. Don't be surprised that the piece ends not on the tonic chord (Bm) but, in anticipation of the next aria, on its dominant (F#). The Qui tollis is part of the Gloria and must be fully appreciated in that wider context. Bach never stopped finetuning his monumental Mass, adding enough liturgical material along the way to make it unacceptable to Protestants and Catholics alike. Like the Art of Fugue, the work recapitulates all of Bach's learning. It is likely that he intended the former as a treatise on the instrumental science of music and the latter, pragmatic considerations aside, as its vocal counterpart. In particular, the Mass is the culmination of all choral music, past and present, to the extent that it features every single idea known to mankind about singing in a group. Bach never heard the Mass performed in full in his lifetime.
Гуру Песен