Sacred & Profane Program Notes

Franz Liszt, flamboyant pianist, renowned conductor, enthusiastic teacher and cerebral composer, had a soap opera-worthy life. From humble beginnings in a small Hungarian village, he eventually experienced musical triumphs in many of the world’s greatest cities. Yet he would also suffer personal tragedies that led him to seek semi-retirement in a monastery near Rome. As a composer, he’s best remembered for his technically demanding piano works, some of them only playable by Liszt himself. As a pianist, he was the toast of Europe. Some consider him to be the greatest pianist of all time. Liszt’s wild piano music and evocative symphonic works were his most popular, but he also composed music for the voice, writing more than 70 solo songs, five Mass settings and one Requiem. Three of these six large-scale choral works are for men’s chorus: The Requiem, the Male-Voice Mass (1848) and the Szekszárd Mass (1869).

The Male-Voice Mass and the Szekszárd Mass are essentially the same piece. Liszt composed his first mass in 1848, not long after he gave up his career as a touring virtuoso (at the age of 35!) to concentrate on composing. Liszt wrote the Mass in Weimar, and the first performance took place there on August 15, 1852 in a Catholic church in celebration of the birthday of Louis Napoleon, President of the French Republic.

In 1857, Liszt wrote to a conductor about performing the Mass:

“I fear that the preparation of this work will cost you and your singers some trouble. Before all else it requires the utmost certainty in intonation, which can only be attained by practicing the parts singly (especially the middle parts, second tenor and first bass)—and then, above all, religious absorption, meditation, expansion, ecstasy, shadow, light, soaring—in a word, Catholic devotion and inspiration. The Credo, as if built on a rock, should sound as steadfast as the dogma itself; a mystic and ecstatic joy should pervade the Sanctus; the Agnus Dei (as well as the Miserere in the Gloria) should be accentuated, in tender and deeply elegiac manner, by the most fervent sympathy with the Passion of Christ; and the Dona nobis pacem, expressive of reconciliation and full of faith, should float away like sweet-smelling incense.”

At around this same, Liszt suggested that some wind and brass instruments could be added to the performing forces in order to double and reinforce the voice parts. While Liszt had originally intended the Mass to be essentially a cappella, the chorus had difficulties with intonation, so he added a simple organ part to double and provide support for the voices. Liszt was going to write the additional instrumental parts himself, but when presented with sketches by Johann Herbeck, a Vienna church musician, Liszt expressed delight with the work and urged him to complete the orchestration. This version of the Mass has never been published, though it was performed in Jena in 1858.

In 1865, Liszt visited the Hungarian town of Szekszárd and promised a new Mass to Baron Antal Augusz for a new church then under construction. Liszt found he was unable to complete a new work, so he revised his earlier Male-Voice Mass into what is now known as the Szekszárd Mass. This version of the Mass was given a public rehearsal in Buda on September 23, 1870, but for reasons that remain a mystery, the subsequent performance was cancelled. The premiere finally occurred in Jena, in 1872.

Stylistically, the Szekszárd Mass looks both backwards and forwards. The harmoic language and partwriting owe an enormous debt to the great Italian Renaissance master, Palestrina. But there are also a number of Listzian touches, including a harmonic language that presages the works of both Brahms and Wagner. There’s a passage in the Mass that sounds as if it’s been lifted wholesale from the Brahms Requiem, except for the fact that Brahms wrote his masterpiece almost 20 years after Liszt wrote the Mass! And Wagner borrowed the most prominent Leitmotiv in Tristan und Isolde directly from a Liszt piano piece. Liszt also quotes medieval plainchant in both the Gloria and the Agnus Dei movements of the Mass. Interestingly, the chant quoted in the Agnus Dei is actually the ancient melody for the invocation at the beginning of the Credo.

The Szekszárd Mass is filled with lush harmonies that exemplify Liszt’s mastery of the male chorus genre. He fully understands and exploits the ranges of the different vocal sections and creates a large-scale work that is both grand and meditative. All of Liszt’s Mass settings were intended for use in actual church services, to today’s performance in the historic Church of the Epiphany is a fitting tribute to this long-neglected masterwork by one of western music’s most interesting and innovative composers.


Damian Močnik is a young Slovenian composer who lives in Cerklje, where he teaches music and conducts two adult choirs. The bulk of his compositional output is for chorus, and this setting of a text by Ovid is meant to be a choral salutation. The fanfare-like vocal line beautifully reflects the text’s invocation to sing and love music.

Leos Janáček is best known today as the composer of popular operas and orchestral works. But from his youth spent as a choirboy in an Augustinian monastery to his adult careers as organist and choir director, sacred music played an important role in Janácek’s musical life. The Ave Maria is an intriguing work. Instead of setting the traditional text of the prayer to Mary, Janácek uses the opening phrase of that text as a recurring theme throughout the piece. The majority of the text is a Czech translation of a portion of Lord Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” talking about the love of nature. The music is in a folk style, with frequent changes of tempo, duets between the different parts, and the unusual harmonies typical of much of Janácek’s music.

Ambrož Čopi is another young Slovenian composer/conductor/educator whose music has won many awards in his native land and received performances around the world. Čopi conducts the Obala mixed choir and Komorni Zbor Nova Gorica, the Chamber Choir of Nova Gorica, a small town in western Slovenia on the Italian border. His setting of the Marian prayer Totus Tuus is lushly neo-Romantic, with rich harmonies and frequently-changing meters. The piece is dedicated to the Chamber Male Choir Celje.

Močnik’s setting of a passage from Isaiah (translated back into English from a Slovenian translation by the composer’s wife) is strongly related to plainchant in terms of both structure and a free sense of meter. There are also elements of folk music in some of the harmonies and rhythms, though the writing is most strongly influenced by the meaning and structure of the text.

Janáček was an avid collector of folk songs and was active in the promotion and preservation of folk music from various ethnic and geographical populations of central Europe. Therefore, it’s not surprising that he wrote a number of folk song arrangements for chorus. The two on today’s program actually come from different sets, but were grouped together as a pair by editor Antonin Tučapsk´y. True Love is a simple love song that juxtaposes elegiac, free-meter direct exclamations of love with more descriptive, metrical passages about the nature of love itself. The Soldier’s Lot also juxtaposes two different musical ideas. The first, quite martial, speaks of the nature of war and the second, more lyrical, invokes the emotions surrounding a soldier’s service in battle.

The Hungarian composer Béla Bártok was also a champion of folk music and one of the fathers of the modern ethnomusicology movement. He was one of the most prominent composers of the 20th century, and his orchestral works are considered part of the standard repertoire and are widely-performed today. All of his music is infused with a strong sense of nationalism, best exemplified by his frequent use of folk melodies. Bártok settings of Five Slovak Folk Songs incorporate many of his standard compositional techniques, including the use of modes (instead of the normal major-minor scales of western music) and alternating meters that mimic the rhythmic instability of some of the original folk melodies and texts.

Another pioneer in the field of ethnomusicology, Zoltán Kodály was a composer, educator and composer. Though he was born in Hungary, he spent most of his childhood in Slovakia, and was imbued with a deep sense of native folk music from the earliest age. Kodály was a mentor and life-long friend to Bártok, with whom he worked to catalog and preserve folk music. Kodály received a PhD in philosophy and linguistics, but he also studied music at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. In addition to the influences of his native folk music, he also spent time in Paris studying with Charles Widor and delighting in the music of Claude Debussy. Eventually, he returned to Budapest and became a professor at the Liszt Academy. Kodály is also remembered for developing a philosophy of music education and composing a great deal of music for children. Though these principles are often referred to as the Kodály Method, Kodály didn’t actually develop a comprehensive teaching curriculum. Nevertheless, the principles he espoused remain important in music education around the world. Just last week, the Camerata gave the opening night concert for the National Conference of the Organization of American Kodály Educators here in Washington, DC.

The three works by Kodály on today’s program are actual choral songs, not simply folk song arrangements. Evening Song is one of Kodály’s most popular choral works. The beautiful, lyrical tenor melody is supported by rich, warm harmonies from the other voice parts. The Peacocks is an excellent illustration of the pitfalls of performing music in translation. Indeed, most of the editions of the songs on the second half of today’s program contain only English translations of the original Hungarian, Slovakian and Czech texts. While the fullest character of the music comes through when sung in the original languages, the translations do capture the essences of the originals, while also providing some amusing accidents of misplaced syllabic emphasis. The Soldier’s Song is a tour-de-force about the pains of love and loss suffered by a soldier going off to war. Kodály’s use of the snare drum and trumpet provide just the right martial touch to drive home the point of the text.