“There’s so much that’s mysterious about Bach’s Mass,” Bill says, and this week he attempts to demystify Bach’s grand work by setting its context in history, tracing relevant antecedents: Bach was writing a Latin mass despite his orientation as a Lutheran. Bill surmises that Bach went back to his musical heroes from the Renaissance. “They composed masses in Latin, and so would he.” Bill illustrates pertinent influences in Beethoven, Strauss, and Haydn as well as how Bach reformed some of his own work to inform his mass.
Bach’s Not-So-Minor B-Minor Mass
