Mannheim Sacred Music
Church music was generally performed in the court chapel. After 1756 special celebrations took place in the larger Jesuit church designed by Allesandro Galli-Bibiens and connected to the palace. At Mannheim, as at most Catholic courts, settings were normally for choir, orchestra and (often) vocal soloists. As per Mozart (Nov. 1777), performing groups for a major mass were quite large: 24 singers, an orchestra of nearly 50, and organ.
The sacred repertory consisted of Masses as well as shorter works, Te Deum, etc. A distinguishing characteristic of the Mannheim Mass settings was omission of the Benedictus from the cycle. It was replaced with an organ solo. (Mozart, Nov. 1777).
The works of the Kapellmeister C.P. Grua, appointed during the reign of Carl Philip, frequently employed a modified stile antico- with no vocal soloists and little independent writing for orchestra. During Carl Theodor’s reign, this conservative style quickly lost ground to the Italian stylus mixtus, which combines relatively homophonic music for chorus or soloists- often highly evocative of the opera house- with stile antico settings such as the conventional closing fugues of the credo and Gloria. The most important representative of this trend was Holzbauer; his many Masses contributed significantly to the development of a truly symphonic mass style- familiar to us from the late Masses of Mozart and Haydn.
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Updated 6/06/05