Piano Excerpts

Mozart's mass settings have always been an integral part of church music practice. Like few other settings of the Ordinary, they combine high artistic perfection and beauty of sound with the requireme...

Composed in the autumn of 1768 during an extended stay in Vienna, this work marks the beginning of a series of masses in which Mozart was always concerned with the expression of true and genuine churc...

The "Missa brevis in D minor" is one of the few masses that Mozart wrote in a minor key. Only two others, the "Missa solemnis", K. 139, and the "Great Mass", K. 427, are also in a minor key.

The "Missa brevis in F" KV 192 (186f) is a highlight among Mozart's youth masses. The music is extremely accessible and charming, and due to the Credo calls interspersed throughout the third movement,...

In the summer of 1774, Mozart wrote two masses in close proximity to each other, the Missa brevis in F K. 192 and the Missa brevis in D K. 194. Both compositions are characterized by a more or less pr...

The nickname of this mass is due to the independent solo presence of the organ instrument during the "Benedictus" section. K. 259 is thus part of a tradition dating back to the 1730s, which can be tra...

In terms of its total duration of almost 30 minutes, Schubert's Mass in B flat major (D 324), composed in 1815, is significantly longer than the classical "Brevis" masses by Mozart and Haydn, and its...

Schubert's Mass in E flat major is the last of his six settings of the Ordinarium Missae and also his most important work in this genre. The mass is full of varied drama and confessional expression an...

The Esterházy dynasty commissioned the most important mass compositions at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries: Joseph Haydn's six great last masses, Beethoven's Mass in C major and the masses by...

The "Messa di Rimini", written in 1809 for Rimini Cathedral, is one of Rossini's extensive contributions to Musica sacra alongside the "Petite Messe solennelle", the "Stabat Mater" and the "Messa di G...

Pietro Metastasio's libretto for La Passione di nostro Signore Gesù Cristo from 1730 is a prototype of the Italian-language Catholic oratorio of the 18th century. The text of the Bible is completely t...

Hasse's Misere in c exists in several authentic versions. The first version from 1735 was intended for the girls of the Ospedale degl'Incurabili in Venice; Carus offers a later version for mixed voice...

Contemporary critics considered Rheinberger's Stabat Mater op. 16, composed in 1864, to be "one of the most beautiful works in this genre in recent times. Distinguished by its broad structure and nobl...

Inspired by Mozart and Cherubini's Requiem settings, Rheinberger created his first major sacred work in 1865 with the "Requiem" op. 60. Before its premiere in 1870, he reworked it once again and dedic...

Rheinberger reported around 150 performances of his Christoforus in Germany and abroad around 1900 - a success story that unfortunately came to an end in the 20th century. With the present edition, ba...

The Missa Beatissimae Virginis Mariae was composed around 1758-1760, between the end of Haydn's time as Kapellsänger at St. Stephen's in Vienna and his first appointment as Kapellmeister to the Bishop...

Johann Michael Haydn worked for over 40 years at the prince-archbishop's court in Salzburg, for whom he composed most of his works. The St. Francis Mass, on the other hand, was commissioned by the imp...

contains: Solo aria "O coelitum beati" (G major); choral movement "Alleluia" (C major)

Joseph Martin Kraus, who was born in the same year as Mozart and, like the famous Salzburg composer, was highly gifted musically and died far too young, has been receiving more attention again in rece...

After Johann Adolf Hasse had finished his work for the opera stage and settled in Venice for good, he still wrote some church music. Out of old ties with the Saxon court, in whose service the composer...

Two complete Requiem settings by Johann Adolf Hasse have survived. Hasse composed the C major Requiem for the Saxon Elector Friedrich August II. Only a few weeks later, his son Elector Friedrich Chris...

Johann Adolf Hasse, Kapellmeister at the Saxon-Polish court in Dresden, composed the Requiem in C for the solemn exequies of the deceased Elector Frederic August II in November 1763 in the Catholic Co...

In contrast to Mozart's much shorter masses of the same period, Leopold Mozart described K. 262 as a "Missa longa". Indeed, the length of the individual movements and the final fugues of the Gloria an...

The two Kyrie settings in E flat K. 322 (1778/79) and in C K. 323 (probably not before 1790) are among the works by Mozart that only exist as incomplete draft scores. In both cases, however, Mozart's...

The Mass in C minor K. 427, Mozart's "Great Mass", is a torso - a circumstance that is extremely regrettable, especially in view of the monumentality of this work. Following his sensational reconstruc...