A listening companion · Bach under Klemperer
Bach’s only setting of the complete Latin Mass, in one recording, track by track. Every number with its full text, its tempo, its harmonic tension and what it says. On the way it explains the Catholic Mass, the ritual these words were written for, from the priest’s entrance to the dismissal.
Recorded for EMI at Kingsway Hall, London, in October 1967; remastered by Warner Classics in 2023. Klemperer was 82. It is a studio recording; he also performed the Mass with the same forces at the Royal Festival Hall that November.
Running time: in 26 tracks. Track numbers on this page follow the 2023 remaster as it streams; on the two-CD EMI set the Credo starts disc 2.
Two remarks before you press play. First, this is the Mass as it was heard for a hundred years before the period-instrument movement: a large choir, a modern symphony orchestra, opera singers as soloists, and tempi that take the music as a cathedral rather than a dance. Klemperer, a German-Jewish conductor who converted to Catholicism in 1919 and later returned to the Jewish faith, brings to it a kind of gravity no one would attempt today. It is slow, but it is not sentimental: the lines are clear, the counterpoint audible, the climaxes built rather than pushed.
Second, the page uses one comparison throughout: John Eliot Gardiner’s 1985 recording with the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, a landmark of the historical approach and the reference recording of Arcs. Against it, every Klemperer track shows how much longer it lasts. The ratio is a rough measure of tempo, not of quality.
Each track of the recording has a card. The cards follow the listening map, one at a time: on a computer they open full screen and lock in place, and ← → step from one to the next; on a phone, swipe sideways. The address always names the card you are on, so a link to it opens it.
On each card, apart from the full Latin text:
The Latin is given as Bach set it. The English gloss button in the card viewer’s top bar adds a line-by-line translation under it. Numbers follow the usual 27-number count; the EMI booklet uses an older count of 24.
The Mass is the central act of Catholic worship: the re-enactment of the Last Supper, in which, by Catholic teaching, bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ and the sacrifice of the cross is made present again. Its name comes from its last words, Ite, missa est, “Go, it is the dismissal”. In Bach’s time it was celebrated according to the Roman Missal of 1570, issued after the Council of Trent. That form, in Latin, survived almost unchanged until 1970.
Its texts fall into two families, and this distinction is the key to everything a composer did with it:
A High Mass (Missa solemnis) is sung by a priest with deacon and subdeacon, incense and choir; a Low Mass is said quietly by a priest alone. Music like Bach’s belongs to the High Mass. While the choir sang the Ordinary, the priest often went on with his own prayers at the altar, silently: the music covered the ritual rather than stopping it. This explains one oddity of the Mass in B minor: the Sanctus and the Benedictus are separated, because the consecration happened between them.
Read down the first column, then the second. The five texts Bach set, the Ordinary, are named in red; the rest are the Proper, which changes from day to day, and the rites and silent prayers of the priest. Links lead to the music.
On Sundays, before Mass, the priest sprinkles the people with holy water, recalling baptism.
Psalm 42, Judica me, and the Confiteor, the confession of sin, said by the priest and ministers. In a sung Mass the choir’s Introit covers them.
The entrance chant: an antiphon, a psalm verse and the doxology. It gives many Sundays their names: Laetare, Gaudete, Requiem.
Nine acclamations in Greek: three times Kyrie eleison, three times Christe eleison, three times Kyrie eleison.
The angels’ hymn, on Sundays and feasts outside Advent and Lent. The priest intones Gloria in excelsis Deo; the choir continues.
The prayer of the day, sung by the priest after Dominus vobiscum – Et cum spiritu tuo.
A reading, usually from the letters of the apostles, chanted by the subdeacon.
Chants between the readings: in Lent a Tract replaces the Alleluia; on a few feasts a Sequence follows, such as the Dies irae or Stabat mater.
Chanted by the deacon, with candles and incense; all stand. In Holy Week the Gospel is the Passion, sung in parts by three deacons.
Optional, and outside the strict rite.
The Nicene Creed, on Sundays and major feasts. The priest intones Credo in unum Deum; all kneel at Et incarnatus est.
The choir sings the Offertory antiphon while the priest offers bread and wine with silent prayers, incenses the altar and washes his hands.
A prayer over the gifts, said silently.
Sung by the priest after the dialogue Sursum corda (“Lift up your hearts”). It changes with the season and ends by joining the song of the angels.
“Holy, holy, holy”: the people join the angels. In a polyphonic High Mass the choir sang it as the Canon began.
The heart of the Mass, said silently. At the words of Christ (Hoc est enim corpus meum) the bread and wine are consecrated and lifted up for all to see; bells ring; all kneel.
In a sung High Mass, the second half of the Sanctus, sung after the elevation: “Blessed is he who comes”, while Christ is held to be present on the altar.
The Lord’s Prayer, sung by the priest; the choir answers Sed libera nos a malo. Then Pax Domini and the breaking of the bread.
Three times “Lamb of God”: twice ending miserere nobis, the third time dona nobis pacem. The priest then receives Communion.
An antiphon sung while Communion is given.
The closing prayer of the day.
The dismissal, sung by the deacon; answer Deo gratias. Strictly part of the Ordinary, but almost never set to music after the Middle Ages; Bach does not set it.
The priest blesses the people and reads the opening of John’s Gospel, In principio erat Verbum, at the altar.
Bach was a Lutheran church musician all his life, and from 1723 Thomaskantor in Leipzig: in charge of music at the city’s main churches. A Latin Mass seems an odd thing for him to write. It is less odd than it looks.
Luther had not abolished the Mass but reformed it. In Leipzig the main Sunday service, the Hauptgottesdienst, kept much of the old shape, and on high feasts kept the Latin too: the Kyrie and Gloria were sung in Latin, often concerted, and on great feasts a Latin Sanctus. A setting of only Kyrie and Gloria was called simply a Missa. Bach wrote four of them (BWV 233–236). He noted the order of a Leipzig service on the score of a cantata for the first Sunday in Advent, 1723:
Praeludiret. Motetta. Praeludiret auf das Kyrie, so ganz musiciret wird. Intoniret vor dem Altar. Epistola verlesen. Wird die Litaney gesungen. Praeludiret auf den Choral. Evangelium verlesen. Praeludiret auf die Haupt-Music. Der Glaube gesungen. Die Predigt. Nach der Predigt, wie gewöhnlich einige Verse aus einem Liede gesungen. Verba Institutionis. Praeludiret auf die Music. Und nach selbiger wechselsweise praeludiret v. Choräle gesungen, biß die Communion zu Ende & sic porrò.
Bach’s note on the order of service, on the score of the cantata “Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland”, BWV 61 (Leipzig, Advent 1723)So the Kyrie was “fully composed”, the Creed was sung, but as a German hymn (Der Glaube, “Wir glauben all an einen Gott”), and the cantata, the Hauptmusik, stood between the Gospel and the sermon. A complete Latin Ordinary had no place in this service.
The Electors of Saxony, though, had been Catholic since 1697, when Augustus the Strong converted to win the crown of Poland. Their court in Dresden had a magnificent Hofkapelle, Italian opera and a Catholic court church. When Augustus died in February 1733, his son Friedrich August II succeeded him. In July Bach sent him the parts of a Kyrie and Gloria, Nos. 1–12 of this Mass, with a petition for a court title. It took three years, but in 1736 Bach became Hofcompositeur to the Saxon court. The 1733 Missa is written for that court’s taste: operatic duets, a horn aria, the newest Italian manner beside the oldest counterpoint.
Fifteen years later, in the last years of his life, Bach took the Missa and expanded it into a setting of the whole Ordinary. He composed some movements new, adapted most from earlier cantatas, and added his Sanctus of 1724. The score he left has four separately numbered parts:
Why he did it is unknown. There was no occasion in Leipzig and no known commission from Dresden or Vienna. The work is too long for any service: even at a brisk tempo it lasts nearly two hours, and here over two and a quarter. Most scholars see it as a summation: Bach’s demonstration of everything vocal music could do, from Renaissance counterpoint to the galant duet, gathered around the oldest and most universal text of Christian worship. Bach never heard it complete. His son Carl Philipp Emanuel listed it after his father’s death as “die große catholische Messe”, the great Catholic Mass; he performed the Credo in Hamburg in 1786. The first known complete performance came in Leipzig in 1859. The title “Mass in B minor”, and later “Hohe Messe”, are nineteenth-century labels.
Two keys. The title is misleading. Only five numbers are in B minor; the Mass is really in D major, the key of the trumpets, and B minor is its shadow. The trumpets and timpani play in eleven numbers, every one in D major; the darker, more inward music moves to the minor keys.
Two styles. Bach sets the newest music of his day, Italian concerto and Dresden opera, beside the strict vocal counterpoint of the sixteenth century, the stile antico (Kyrie II, Gratias, Credo, Confiteor, Dona nobis pacem). The old style appears at moments of confession and of thanks; the new style for praise and personal prayer.
Borrowing. Most of the Mass is Parodie: music from earlier works, mostly cantatas, refitted to Latin words. To Bach this was not a shortcut but a way of preserving his best music in a form that would last beyond one Sunday. Each card names the source where it is known.
The Credo as an arch. Bach composed the Creed around its centre. Choruses frame it; two solo numbers stand at equal distance from the middle; three choruses, on the incarnation, death and resurrection, form the core, with the Crucifixus at the exact centre. He reached this symmetry only late, by giving Et incarnatus est its own movement.
The Credo’s nine numbers. The outer pairs mirror each other: a fugue on a Gregorian melody in the old style, then a D major chorus with trumpets. Fill shows harmonic tension, from light (low) to dark (high).
Klemperer’s Mass lasts , Gardiner’s : about longer. But the extra time is not spread evenly, and where it falls says something about the reading.
He slows most in the movements of grief and supplication: the Crucifixus (×1.54), the Confiteor with its Adagio and the following Vivace (×1.49 together), the opening Kyrie (×1.44) and the Qui sedes (×1.43). He is nearly as fast as Gardiner in the old-style choruses and the hushed ones: Et incarnatus est (×0.99), Qui tollis (×1.05), Dona nobis pacem (×1.05) and the Gratias (×1.06). For Klemperer, the archaic style already carries its own gravity; it is the expressive modern music that he broadens.
The lower row of the map below shows this ratio for every track; the red dashed line marks equal length.
One block per track, in proportion to its length under Klemperer. Upper row: harmonic tension. Lower row: Klemperer’s duration relative to Gardiner’s. Tap a block to jump to its card.