A Mass in Time of Terror?

Synopsis

If you were a member of the European nobility, the summer of 1798 was a scary time. That revolutionary wild man Napoleon Bonaparte had crushed your armies on land and now word had it his fleet had escaped a British blockade. The possibility that Napoleon would control both land and sea struck terror in many a nobleman’s breast.

During this anxious time Prince Nicholas Esterhazy the Second’s favorite composer Joseph Haydn composed a Latin mass titled “Missa in angustiis” or “Mass in Time of Fear.” It opens in the key of D minor, the key employed by Mozart for the spookiest scenes in “Don Giovanni,” an opera that had made a big impression on Haydn at its premiere in Vienna ten years earlier. As Haydn scholar H. C. Robbins Landon puts it, in ‘Don Giovanni,’ 18th century listeners were presented with "the presence of real fear – nay terror.”

So, when word reached the rattled princes of Europe that the British Admiral Nelson had destroyed the French fleet, everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief, and, coincidentally, Haydn ends his Mass in the more optimistic key of D Major.

First performed on today’s date in 1798, Haydn’s work soon came to be known as the “Lord Nelson Mass,” and in Robbins Landon’s view stands as “arguably Haydn’s greatest single composition.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Franz Joseph Haydn Missa in angustiis (Lord Nelson Mass)

On This Day

Births

• 1899 - American composer William Levi Dawson, in Anniston, Ala.;

• 1920 - Armenian composer Alexander Arutiunian, in Yerevan; His Trumpet Concerto, composed in 1950, is his best-known work;

• 1926 - American composer and jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, in Hamlet, N.C.;

• 1928 - American pianist and composer Robert Helps, in Passaic, New Jersey;

Deaths

• 1835 - Italian opera composer Vincenzo Bellini, age 33, in Puteaux (near Paris);

• 2006 - British composer Sir Malcolm Arnold, age 84, in Norfolk county, eastern England;

Premieres

• 1777 - Gluck: opera, "Armide," at the Académie Royale in Paris;

• 1913 - Charles Wakefield Cadman: Piano Trio in D, at a private home in Denver; The first public performance took place the following month in Minneapolis;

• 1958 - Stravinsky: "Threni," at San Rocco in Venice, by the North German Radio Orchestra of Hamburg (who had commissioned the work), conducted by the composer;

• 1962 - Copland: "Connotations" for Orchestra, at Philharmonic Hall (now Avery Fisher Hall) during the opening season of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein; This concert, televised by CBS, also included the "Gloria" from Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis" and the first movement ("Veni, creator spiritus") from Mahler's Symphony No.8;

• 1965 - Diamond: "Elegies" for Flute, English Horn, and Strings, by Murray Panitz (flute), Louis Rosenblatt (English horn), and the Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy conducting;

• 1990 - James MacMillan: "Sowetan Spring" for winds, at the Glasgow Hospitality Inn by the winds of the Royal Scottish Orchestra, John Paynter conducting.