J.D. Zelenka: Missa Votiva

Imagine you were Johann Sebastian Bach. After a hard week of composing, you feel that you need a well-deserved break. You then order a horse-drawn carriage to travel to a neighboring town to listen to music made by another well-known composer, one that you both know personally and whose music you highly appreciate.

That’s precisely what I did in the other day. I’m not a composer, nor do I know whether Bach ever made such a trip, but I drove 50 km to a small coastal town, Porvoo, to hear music that Bach could have gone to listen to, this time performed in the local Cathedral that has stood on top of the hill long before Bach was born. The music was composed by Bach’s contemporary, the Czech Baroque composer Jan Dismas Zelenka, and the piece was Missa Votiva. An ode to life. Going there took me 40 minutes; Bach would have needed a whole day or something.

MISSA VOTIVA

Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679 – 1745), both a composer and a musician (violin, double-bass), was born in Bohemia and educated in Prague and Vienna. Most of his professional life he spent in Dresden (Court Orchestra). It is known (a letter by Bach’s son C.P.E. Bach) that Bach held Zelenka in high esteem as a composer, as did Telemann and Graupner among others.

Missa Votiva is one of Jan Dismas Zelenka’s latest works. It is believed that Zelenka composed the work as a gesture of gratitude after recovering from a serious illness. The name Missa Votiva refers to a mass performed as a promise or thanksgiving to God (the word votiva comes from the Latin word votum, meaning prayer, wish, or promise). So when Jan Dismas Zelenka set out to compose the Missa Votiva in 1739, he presumably wanted to express something deeply personal, a true musical prayer, in which each movement bears the imprint of personal conviction and artistic brilliance.

Zelenka’s music is admired, first and foremost, for its harmonic inventiveness and mastery of counterpoint, and with its dramatic choral movement, surprising harmony and virtuoso orchestration, Missa Votiva makes no exception. It features long and complex melodies with rich ornamentation and fast sections and turns, resulting is music, as one commentator put it, that pulsates with life, hope and deep faith. After having experienced Missa Votiva I can confirm on my own behalf that Zelenka certainly is a unique voice in the late Baroque, and Missa votiva clearly such a masterpiece that deserves to be performed more often (it was not excluded that the work had never been performed before in Finland), and this goes for Zelenka’s other music as well.

Most striking of all was that, albeit a mass, most of the composition is very festive and played with vivacity, many of the arias being in a shining major key. It’s technically orthodox and complex music with an operatic expression, long ear-friendly passages making the appearance of the music clearly lighter and brighter than Bach’s choral music, but never superficial or sentimental in style. It soon becomes evident that a mass or other church choral music need not be gloomy and heavy to be skillful and serious. Of course, as a Catholic Zelenka wrote for a different religious tradition and idiom than the Lutheran Bach. It was amazing to hear and realize how different music emerges from these two different traditions. One could even argue that Bach’s music always sounds Bach’s music, but in comparison, Zelenka’s music sounds remarkably timeless.

From the organizer’s booklet:

“Discover the glow of the Baroque! Imagine a musical treasure that has been hidden for centuries – a work full of emotion, virtuosity and power. Jan Dismas Zelenka’s Missa Votiva (1739) is just such a gem: a Baroque masterpiece that deserves its place alongside Bach and Handel.” I fully agree, and that also applies to music by other Baroque composers that Bach highly valued, such as Johann Joseph Fux, Antonio Caldara, Reinhard Keiser, Carl Heinrich Graun, Johann Gottlieb Graun, and Franz Benda.

THE PERFORMANCE

About seventy minutes long piece consists in twenty parts, some short, some longer. Zelenka scored the work for a standard Baroque orchestra of strings and woodwinds, basso continuo being handed over to two cellos and one double-bass, choral parts are sung by a multi-headed choir, and four soloists who also sing their own arias. Given that it was an amateur choir (Oratoriekören, Håkan Wikman as the choir coach), given that it was a reasonably large choir (plus 50 singers), and given that the time for rehearsal was tight, the choir survived its share with honor, even though it didn’t always quite keep up with all the twists and turns of Zelenka’s music. The same goes for the orchestra (Chamber Orchestra Refugium musicum), and the soloists (Johanna Lehesvuori, soprano, Ruut Mattila, alto, Juho Punkeri, tenor, and Joona Juntunen, bass) who, overall, gave an enthusiastically satisfying performance under the direction of Nils Schweckendiek.

STRUCTURE: