Performing Bach's Mass in B Minor: Some Notes by Heinrich Schenker

Abstract

The Oster Collection of the New York Public Library contains the major portion of Heinrich Schenker's 'Nachlass'. Included in this collection are documents related to Schenker's work on Bach's Mass in B Minor, the most prominent of which is a review of a performance by the Berlin Singakademie under its music director Georg Schumann in Vienna on 27 October 1926. The Oster Collection also contains six voice - leading graphs of sections of the Mass - two of the opening ritornello of the "Christe" and four others representing the openings of four consecutive movements of the "Symbolum Nicenum," namely, the "Et in unum," "Et incarnatus est," "Crucifixus," and "Et resurrexit." Although Schenker discussed aspects of the Mass in B Minor in Kontrapunkt (1910) and later in Der freie Satz (1935), the 1926 essay and these six graphs, which probably also date from the second half of the 1920s, are by far his most important contributions to the study of this work.