Missa brevis

Missa brevis (plural: Missae breves) is Latin for "short Mass". The term usually refers to a mass composition that is short because part of the text of the Mass ordinary that is usually set to music in a full mass is left out, or because its execution time is relatively short.

Full mass with a relatively short execution time

The concise approach is found in the mostly syllabic settings of the 16th century, and in the custom of "telescoping" (or simultaneous singing by different voices) in 18th-century masses. After the period when all church music was performed a cappella, a short execution time usually also implied modest forces for performance, that is: apart from Masses in the "brevis et solemnis" genre.

Polyphony

18th century

For composers of the classical period such as Mozart missa brevis meant "short in duration" – as opposed to "missa longa" (long mass), a term that Leopold Mozart used for his son's K. 262 – rendering the complete words of the liturgy. As the words were well known some composers had different voice parts recite simultaneously different sections of long texts. This is especially characteristic of Austrian masses in the Gloria and the Credo.

Missa brevis (Haydn)

The Missa brevis in F major, Hob. XXII:1, is a mass by Joseph Haydn. According to Dack it is Haydn's "earliest authenticated work." It also represents some of the last of his compositional activity, as in his old age he spent some time attempting to revise it.

Composition

Dack (2009) suggests that Haydn originally composed the work when he was still a teenaged chorister at St. Stephen's Cathedral, singing under the direction of Georg Reutter. In its original form, the mass was scored for fairly rudimentary forces: two violin parts, continuo, a four-part chorus, and solo parts for two trebles. When the young Haydn, newly unemployed after being dismissed from the choir at St. Stephen's, made a pilgrimage to Mariazell, the Missa brevis was one of the works he showed the music director there.

The work is a clear example of the Austrian missa brevis form. Redlich writes of "the Austrian type of the Missa Brevis, notorious for the hurried expediency with which large tracts of the text of the Mass are musically disposed of. In the Creed the text from "Patrem omnipotentem" to "Et vitam venturi" is dealt with in no more than twenty-nine bars. This is managed by the simultaneous singing of different sentences—the profession of catholic faith, "Et unam sanctam catholicam ... ecclesiam", tucked away in the contralto." Redlich adds that, like similar instances of the missa brevis, Haydn repeats the music for the Kyrie in the final "Dona nobis pacem" section.

Bach's church music in Latin

Church music in Latin by Johann Sebastian Bach comprises about ten compositions, all composed during his Leipzig period. As a Lutheran church musician, Bach was more devoted to the composition of sacred music in German, writing hundreds of liturgical compositions in that language, and for instance also producing a German version of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater. Compared to Lutheran practice elsewhere, an uncharacteristic amount of Latin was however used in church services in Leipzig: it included music on Latin texts being performed on ordinary Sundays, on high holidays (Christmas, Easter, Pentecost), and the Magnificat also on Marian feasts (Annunciation, Visitation, Purification).

In Lutheran service, a Missa was a setting of only Kyrie and Gloria. Such a mass consisting of only Kyrie and Gloria is for that time period sometimes indicated as Missa brevis (literally: "short mass"). In 1733 Bach composed such a Missa brevis for the Catholic court in Dresden, however in an extended setting. In the late 1730s he again composed four Missae breves, mostly parodies of earlier cantata movements. At the end of his life he expanded the Missa for Dresden to his only setting of the complete Mass ordinary, the Mass in B minor.