Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837)
Missa Solemnis in C • Te Deum
By 1803 it had become apparent to Joseph Haydn that he was
no longer capable of fulfilling his duties as Kapellmeister at the Esterházy
court. Accordingly, he recommended the appointment of Mozart’s former pupil
Hummel for the post of Concertmeister and divided his existing duties between
Hummel, Johann Nepomuk Fuchs, the Vice-Kapellmeister, and the
Kammer-musikdirektor Luigi Tomasini. Hummel’s contract became effective from
1st April 1804 and in a resolution signed by Prince Nicolaus II on 23rd June 1804
his responsibilities were outlined in some detail: “... the Concertmeister
Hummel is to have the direction of cantatas, oratorios and such music pieces as
do not fall under the genre of church music, and altogether in rehearsals and
productions of his own works”. The general divisions of responsibility - Fuchs
church music, Tomasini instrumental music and Hummel secular vocal music
including opera - were not adhered to rigorously and this created a good deal
of tension within the prince’s musical establishment. Although Fuchs appears as
a rather pedantic individual in the historical record, it is impossible not to
feel a measure of sympathy for him, given Hummel’s arrogant and inconsiderate
behaviour at times. Hummel seems to have been a very casual disciplinarian and
there is no doubt that the overall standard of the Esterházy Kapelle declined
as a result. He was summarily dismissed after a chaotic performance on
Christmas Day 1808 and it was only after repeated requests to be taken back
into service that Prince Nicolaus II relented.
Prince Nicolaus II Esterházy (1765-1833) succeeded his
father as the reigning prince in 1794. He was a difficult man, severe and
uncongenial by nature and thoroughly debauched in his private life. Although
music did not occupy a central place in his life, he did have a strong and
genuine interest in church music. He began to build up his library’s holdings
in this area, which had languished since the death of Haydn’s predecessor,
Gregor Werner, and perhaps as a consequence of the wide-sweeping church music
reforms introduced by Joseph II in 1783. More importantly, he instigated the
tradition of having a new Mass performed annually on the name-day of his wife,
Princess Maria Hermenegild. In the first fifteen years of his reign Fuchs,
Hummel and Beethoven all wrote Masses for the occasion, in addition to Haydn’s
six magnificent settings which ended in 1802 with the Harmoniemesse. These
performances generally took place in September on the Princess’s name-day in
the Bergkirche in Eisenstadt.
Hummel’s five settings of the Mass were composed between
1804 and 1808. The Mass in E flat, Op. 80, the second of Hummel’s Masses to be
published, was almost certainly composed before the Mass in B flat,
Op. 77. The D minor Mass was begun in August 1805, the Missa
Solemnis in C, composed for the wedding of Princess Leopoldina Esterházy, was
completed in March 1806 and the final work, the Mass in D, Op. 111, the
so-called Third Mass, was written in 1808. It was perhaps to this work - or
conceivably the Missa Solemnis in C, which is known to have been performed in
April 1808 - that Haydn was alluding when he remarked to the composer during
Hummel’s visit to his home in Vienna the following month: ‘Well, dear Hummel,
I’ve already heard that you’ve written such a beautiful Mass and was pleased
about it. I often said to you that you would be somebody. Continue like this
and consider that everything beautiful and good comes from above’.
Hummel’s autograph score of the Missa Solemnis in C was
completed in March 1806, three months after the Te Deum. Hummel carefully noted
on the last page of the autograph that the work had been composed for the
wedding of Princess Leopoldina Esterházy [Marzo 806 / composta all’occasione /
dello sposalizio di S. Alt. / la Principessa Leopoldina / d’Esterhazy; eseguito
ai Aprille 808.] Hummel’s reference to a performance in April 1808 is puzzling,
since surely the work was performed as intended during the wedding celebrations
in 1806. It appears, after all, to have been completed in good time for the
occasion. Princess Maria Leopoldina Josepha Aloysia Esterházy von Galantha
(1788-1846), the daughter of Prince Nicolaus II and Princess Marie Hermenegild
Esterházy, married Moritz Joseph Johann Baptist Viktor von Liechtenstein (1775-1819)
in Eisenstadt on 13th April 1806. It must have ranked as the Society Wedding of
the Year, given the enormous wealth, power, influence and prestige of the two
families. That Hummel was invited to compose the work for the occasion is a
clear indication of his high professional standing with the Prince. Perhaps the
failure of Beethoven’s C major Mass the following year (the Prince felt
compelled to write to a friend: “Beethoven’s Mass is unbearably ridiculous and
detestable, and I am not convinced that it can ever be performed properly. I am
angry and mortified”) should be viewed as much in the context of Hummel’s
personal triumph in 1806 as in terms of the poor performance and challenging
nature of the work. It is unlikely that Haydn attended the ceremony, given his
poor state of health, but he was fond of Princess Leopoldina and doubtless took
a close personal and professional interest in her wedding celebrations.
The composition of the Missa Solemnis seems to have caused
Hummel a great deal more trouble than the Te Deum. It is clear from the
autograph that after Hummel completed the work, presumably in March 1806 as
indicated on the score, he revised it at a later but unspecified date. The
evidence for this comes not only in the form of numerous cancellations and
re-workings in the main body of the score, but also in the presence of
interleaved pages in the hand of a copyist. The auxiliary score (the
instrumentation was too large for Hummel to write a complete system on a single
page) largely escaped this process of revision and thus preserves the original
form of the bassoon, trumpet and timpani parts.
The Missa Solemnis is a worthy successor to the late Haydn
Masses. Its brilliant orchestration, inventive and flexible choral writing and
technical resourcefulness are the work of an experienced and gifted composer.
While the work obviously owes much to the example of the late Haydn Masses it
is no pale, bloodless imitation. The Kyrie is a deeply satisfying movement. The
Grave opening is at once highly dramatic and yet firmly rooted in the long and
distinguished Viennese tradition of C major festive Masses. In contrast, the
quiet opening of the succeeding Allegro moderato, scored for winds alone, is an
astonishingly modern touch. The choral writing is lyrical but not without its
moments of drama; the accompaniment, which benefits enormously from Hummel’s
brilliant handling of his orchestral forces, infuses the Kyrie with tremendous
drive and verve.
The Gloria is a highly original movement. Shunning the
conventional division of the Gloria into three or more interlinked sections,
Hummel sets the text in a single large-scale movement unified by the use of a
recurring theme which is developed as the movement unfolds. Given the length of
the text, Hummel’s preference for homophonic choral textures is hardly
surprising, but his employment of blocks of
a cappella writing is startling and with their pseudo-modal
harmonies he successfully creates a sense of timelessness and even of mystery
which is highly effective.
The Credo is another singularly impressive movement with
much to commend it. At its heart lies a sublimely beautiful setting of the Et
incarnatus (in the radiant key of A major) which slips seamlessly into the
intense, concentrated Crucifixus, which is remarkable for its unstable
chromatic harmonies and nervous, shuddering string figuration. Not
unexpectedly, there are strong thematic links between the outer sections of the
Credo although little in the way of bald, literal repetition. Hummel again
eschews formal counterpoint but the choral writing is varied and animated
nonetheless. He also uses the voices in pairs which lends a new element of
variety to the musical texture.
Unusually, the Sanctus-Benedictus is the longest movement in
the entire Mass, owing, one assumes, to the occasion for which the work was
composed. It also presents an interesting performance problem in that the
autograph calls for vocal soloists in the twenty-bar Sanctus (with a brief
flourish in the Osanna) but not in the Benedictus. This is a wasteful use of
musical resources by any stretch of the imagination and it seems highly likely
that the soloists were also intended to sing the Benedictus, the vocal writing
of which is in many respects quite different in character to that found in the
remainder of the work. The martial opening of the Benedictus is again
reminiscent of Haydn, although its more relaxed continuation is perhaps more
appropriate to a nuptial Mass.
The Agnus Dei, like the earlier Et incarnatus, displays once
again Hummel’s ability to write outstandingly beautiful music within the rather
severe restrictions of convention, a gift surely remembered by Prince Nicolaus
when he encountered Beethoven’s Mass the following year. The Dona nobis is
ushered in with a blaze of C major before settling down into an impressive
double fugue. The Mass ends in an exultant, almost savage surge of power that
must have thrilled its first audience and, one hopes, the newly-married
Princess Leopoldina.
The autograph score of the Te Deum is dated 1st January
1806. In the inventory of the Esterházy music library, prepared by Hummel at
the Prince’s behest, the Te Deum is described as having been composed for a
Friedensfeyer, or celebration of a Peace Treaty. The most likely candidate for this
is the Treaty of Pressburg, signed on 26th December 1805, which marked the end
of the war between the Austro-Russian Alliance and France following Napoleon’s
brilliant victory at Austerlitz on 2nd December. Given his interest in church
music and the magnitude of the event, one can imagine Nicolaus instructing
Hummel to compose a grand Te Deum to mark the occasion. John Eric Floreen,
however, the leading authority on Hummel’s church music, questions whether the
work was ever performed in Eisenstadt. Not only is there no mention of the work
in the diary of Joseph Rosenbaum, a close friend of Haydn and a valuable
primary source of information from this period, but more significantly there is
no record of a set of parts for the work in the Esterházy archives. This lack
of evidence is not in itself conclusive but it does raise questions as to
whether Hummel actually composed the work for the Prince. After all, one need
only look as far as Haydn’s great Te Deum of 1799-1800 for the precedent of an
Esterházy musician responding to an external commission for a work of this
type.
Unlike the problematic autograph score of the Missa
Solemnis, which also exists in the form of a score and appendix, the Te Deum is
relatively straightforward. There are occasional corrections, changes in text
underlay and, of course, the inevitable minor uncorrected errors which are to
be found in any manuscript source. There are, however, a number of other
annotations and deletions which are a good deal more troublesome and indeed
‘revisions’ which appear in many respects to be inferior to the original text
and wholly lacking in corroborative support in the form of instrumental
doubling. This recording is based where possible on the original readings.
Unlike Haydn’s Te Deum which sets the text sequentially with
no repetition of earlier material, Hummel reintroduces short phrases late in
the work (from bar 425) before the text ‘ ... nomen tuum in saeculum, et in
saeculum saeculi’. This marks a rather interesting departure from the usual
practice in Viennese church music, although one not without precedent, and in a
small way it anticipates Beethoven’s surprise reintroduction of ‘Gloria in
excelsis Deo’ after the monumental ‘In gloria Dei Patris’ fugue in the Missa
Solemnis.
The Te Deum is an immensely attractive work. The
orchestration blazes with bright primary colours and the choral writing is
fluid and attractive. Although relatively short in duration, the Te Deum
contains moments of great emotional gravity as well as pure transcendent joy.
If indeed Hummel did compose the work to celebrate the Peace of Pressburg, one
might argue that the Alliance’s defeat at Austerlitz received a far greater
musical memorial than did Wellington’s victory at the Battle of Vittoria a few
years later.
Allan Badley