"The Everest of Sacred Music"
by Ken Myers
The city of Salzburg has a rich religious and cultural history. Today, its cultural identity and legacy are most dramatically expressed by the annual Salzburg Festival, first held in 1920. The idea for that prestigious event began gestating during the First World War. It combined a late-nineteenth-century dream of founding an annual Mozart Festival—to honor the city's most celebrated musical native son—with an early-twentieth-century eagerness to confront the sense of foreboding evoked by the war. The suffering, destruction, and chaos unleashed by the scale of international conflict was something of an anti-sacrament: an outward and visible sign of an inward absence, the ghostly vacuum left by the loss of meaning felt by modern Western institutions and intellectuals.
A rising tide of nihilism was washing away the security that had long been maintained by the confidences of Christendom. Foundational beliefs were now discredited and dismantled, having been deemed naive and immature. The Salzburg Festival was hopefully envisioned to be "as it were the Olympic Games of Art in the modern era" (in the words of Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig): a series of artistic performances around which could be imagined a source of unity and common humanity.
Arts festivals like this are typically quasi-liturgical events. They have their roots in and can only sustain their intelligibility by reference to forms of religious celebration. Josef Pieper argued that the spirit of true festivity rests in confidence in the goodness of Creation, and by extension in the good generosity of the Creator. In In Tune with the World: A Theory of Festivity, Pieper wrote that "man cannot have the experience of receiving what is loved, unless the world and existence as a whole represent something good and therefore beloved to him." Furthermore, he argued, true festivity cannot be present if God is regarded as an unnecessary hypothesis with respect to our celebrations:
There can be no festivity when man, imagining himself self-sufficient, refuses to recognize that Goodness of things which goes far beyond any conceivable utility; it is the goodness of reality taken as a whole which validates all other particular goods and which man himself can never produce nor simply translate into social or individual "welfare." He truly receives it only when he accepts it as pure gift. The only fitting way to respond to such a gift is by praise of God in ritual worship. In short, it is the withholding of public worship that makes festivity wither at the root.
The Great Anniversary Mass
More than 200 years before the birth of the Salzburg Festival, the city had an opportunity to celebrate a remarkable anniversary. The year 1682 marked 1,100 years since the date traditionally recognized as the founding of the archbishopric of St. Peter in Salzburg. The city was formally known as a prince-archbishopric, an ecclesiastical territory that was a state of the Holy Roman Empire. The last archbishop to rule Salzburg (from 1772 until 1803) was Hieronymus von Colloredo, best-known today (if at all) as Mozart's patron.
Many of Salzburg's archbishops had been patrons of the arts, eager to establish the glory of their city as "the Rome of the North." The liturgical celebrations in the city were lavish, and as early as the fourteenth century, the cathedral boasted an impressive (for the times) organ. In the late seventeenth century, the archbishopric was governed by Maximilian Gandolph von Kuenburg, who apparently spent almost a decade making plans for the 1682 festival.
Salzburg was blessed at that time with the skills of a remarkable composer, Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, who since 1670 had been in the employ of the archbishop. For the big event, Biber composed the biggest work of his career, Missa Salisburgensis. This Mass setting has been called "the Mahler 8th of the Baroque" and "the Everest of sacred choral music," as it is scored for sixteen vocal parts and 37 instrumentalists. These forces are grouped into seven ensembles, placed in separate spaces in the acoustically rich space of the Salzburg Cathedral.
The music is astonishing. While Salzburg may have thought of itself as the Rome of the North, Biber's composition actually explores the possibilities of the polychoral sound made famous in an Italian city a ways north of Rome. Since the mid-sixteenth century, that style had been perfected by composers in residence at San Marco Cathedral in Venice, including especially Adrian Willaert, Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, and Claudio Monteverdi.
The biography of the Missa Salisburgensis is as wonderful as the music itself. For a long time, it was thought to be the work of a Franco-Italian composer from earlier in the seventeenth century, Orazio Benevoli. One factor in its attribution to Biber was a fortuitous find in the nineteenth century. As classical music journalist Alexandra Coghlan relates, "The work's manuscript was famously discovered in the 1870s in the possession of a Salzburg greengrocer, who, so the story goes, had intended to use its large pages to wrap vegetables." Only in the mid-1970s—thanks to various forensic techniques of tireless musicologists—was Biber's composership well secured.
Ken Myers is the host and producer of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Formerly an arts editor with National Public Radio, he also serves as music director at All Saints Anglican Church in Ivy, Virginia. He is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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