BEETHOVEN | Missa solemnis

Music is constantly changing. Musicologists and historians are not entirely in agreement as to the dynamics of these changes. Some musical tendencies are compared to streams that keep flowing. Once a while they merge into larger rivers. The rivers are so large that they not only combine different waters but also create a completely new landscape. The water of a great river never goes up, but it goes to the sea or ocean. It was the same with Beethoven.

He transformed all musical genres to which his works belong. The symphony had been born long before him, but Beethoven gave it momentum and a deep ideological program. Piano sonatas were also created by many composers, but it was only he who gave them a feature of deep emotionality, reserved for other musical genres. Beethoven is a bridge between Bach, Mozart and Haydn and Mahler, Wagner and Shostakovich. Nothing after him was the same ever again.

It was no different with a mass. Beethoven reached into the tradition of this musical genre until then belonging to the sacred environment. Through "Missa Solemnis" he transformed it into a concert composition with the monumental form. It did not include the traditional arrangement of solid movements in masses, which means that he wrote it with the thought of concert halls rather than liturgical spaces. He did not stop at the external expression of the celebration but gave it a deep, internal emotionality. This is not a collective prayer, but a personal prayer, as he wrote in Agnus Dei: "for external and internal peace."

Latvija Choir returns to our Philharmonic. It is one of the best singing ensembles in Europe, which performed the inaugural concert of our new headquarters in 2015. The Ninth Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven was played at that time. Undoubtedly, his music is inseparably connected with changes in our reality.