Bruckner's Mass IN d Minor: Performance Implications for the 19th-Century Symphonic Mass

Doctoral Research Project, DMA, ConductingHistorically informed performance procedures have become quite popular with musicians of the past fifty years. Baroque performance practice is the most developed field of this research, and in this day and age, educated musicians can talk with ease, if not total agreement, about subjects such as the number of singers in Bach’s choir, the use of period instruments, the influence of dance forms, and expressive elements such as tempi, tone color, and articulation. But what about performance practices of the 19th century? How did the music of Brahms, Mendelssohn, and Wagner sound? Imagine for a moment hearing a Brahms symphony either on a recording or at the last live performance you attended. What are the colors coming from the orchestra? What is the size of the ensemble? Are the tempi generally fast or slow, steady or flexible? Do the strings in the orchestra make a consistent use of vibrato and portamento? Virtually all modern-day classically trained musicians have grown up playing and listening to the music of Romantic composers such as Brahms, Mendelssohn, and Chopin. Today, there is a certain comfort level with this repertoire, so much so that musicians have a preconceived sound concept for this music. How do musicians know, however, that the way this Romantic literature is being performed is historically informed? Are there resources to which modern-day musicians can turn to educate themselves on the way that 19thcentury musicians played the music of their time? Fortunately, music of the late Romantic era is preserved in the most valuable of all possible primary sources: recordings. In fact, the earliest surviving music recording is that of a choral performance from the 1888 Crystal Palace Handel Festival in London featuring portions of Handel’s Israel in Egypt.1 An enormous number of recordings survive from around 1900 that allow present-day musicians to enter this world of the past. Performance practice scholarship of the last twenty years has seen an increase in analysis of these recordings, as well as research into 19th-century books on singing technique and interpretation, and techniques of playing the piano, violin, and other instruments. Additionally, many of these treatises shed light on issues of tempo, phrasing, dynamics, and tone color, serving as virtual “how-to” guides straight from the pens of the actual performers and teachers of the Romantic period. This project is an exploration of 19th-century performance procedures and documentation of a historically informed performance of Bruckner’s Mass in D Minor. The goal of the project is to present viable new options for performing, interpreting, and experiencing choral-orchestral works of the late Romantic era. Bruckner’s Mass in D Minor was chosen for this study for several reasons. First of all, the piece is rarely performed and therefore is new to the ears of even highly trained classical musicians. (Acclaimed conductor Joseph Flummerfelt, who was present for my performance, had never before heard the piece.) This was beneficial for an experiment of this nature because neither the performing musicians nor the audience came into the performance with a preconceived concept of how the piece should sound, which allowed for more freedom to experiment with 19th-century performance techniques. Secondly, not much research exists on this mass, and because of this it was calling out to be studied. Lastly, not much is known about the first performance of this piece, which encouraged the Eastman performers to utilize special creativity with the 19th century techniques. The performance of Bruckner’s Mass in D Minor took place on April 11, 2010, at Sacred Heart Cathedral in Rochester, New York. Performers included the Eastman-Rochester Chorus, the Eastman Chorale, the Eastman Philharmonia, organ, and vocal soloists. The performance utilized two conductors due to the placement of choirs in front of the orchestra (explanation to follow). I conducted the orchestra and my colleague Gregory Ristow was the chorus conductor. Primary sources for this project included Bruckner’s manuscript of the mass, diagrams and images of 19th-century choral-orchestral performances, and recordings of early choral and orchestral performances