The music, indeed perhaps the name, of this composer may be unfamiliar to many listeners. But Josef Rheinberger was the composer of 20 organ sonatas, which still take their place in the repertoire of virtuosos. Catholic choirmasters, especially in Germany, still draw on his church music. When in 1877 he became Conductor of the Royal Vocal Chapel in Munich, Director of Sacred Music at St. Cajetan Church, Rheinberger had reached the highest position for a church musician in Southern Germany. He was a standard-bearer for the conservative, anti-Wagnerian musical faction, and his own antipathy to Wagner was reinforced by witnessing at close quarters the feuds and machinations surrounding the premiere of Tristan and Isolde in 1865.
Yet Rheinberger never tried to inflict his views on his many pupils, who included Humperdinck, Wolf-Ferrari, and Furtwängler. Hans von Bülow, who lost his wife to Wagner during the Tristan imbroglio, changed sides and became Rheinberger’s friend and advocate. He described him as an ideal teacher, and ‘one of the worthiest musicians and human beings in the world’. The Mass in E flat is widely regarded as Rheinberger’s masterpiece, and illustrates how his traditionalism could produce fresh and interesting music.
The Mass in E flat was a creative manifesto. Like Bruckner’s Mass in E minor, it was composed partly in response to criticism from the Cecilian movement, which sought to reform Catholic church music by a return to strict observance of the principles laid down in the music of Palestrina, which were believed to have been endorsed by the Council of Trent in the late 16th century. But even a modern Palestrina, Rheinberger said, would choose to compose in a contemporary idiom. The hostility of the more doctrinaire Cecilians towards Rheinberger’s aesthetic idependence was all the greater in that unlike Bruckner, who was drawn to the music of Wagner, Rheinberger should have been expected to be loyal to their party.
Born in Vaduz, Lichtenstein, of parents originating from the canton of the Grisons in Switzerland, Rheinberger showed very early talent as organist and composer. By his twelfth year he was studying in Munich, his home for the rest of his life. His mentors there, Wilhelm Riehl and Emil von Schafhäutl, were reactionaries, according to Peter Cornelius, hated by Liszt, Wagner and Bülow. Although Rheinberger composed in many genres, his main career was in church music, and in addition to his posts as organist and director, from 1864 for 20 years he was conductor of the Munich Oratorio Society – his Christmas cantata The Star of Bethlehem (1890) is still performed.
Rheinberger was no admirer of the music of the New German School of Liszt, Wagner and their followers. Here is his credo, written in a letter to a pupil shortly before his death: ‘Music without singability and beauty of sound has no legitimacy…Music should never be despondent or morose. Music is basically an outpouring of joy, and even in pain knows no pessimism’. Rheinberger was enough of a Romantic, schooled on Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann as well as middle-period Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach, to reject the pale imitations of ‘Palestrina’ endorsed by the Cecilians. His declaration of independence brought on him such hostile attacks in their journals that he decided to seek a decision on the highest level, and dedicated the Cantus Missae to the reigning Pope, Leo XIII, who responded by making Rheinberger a Knight of the Order of St. Gregory.
When Rheinberger composed this Mass in E flat, in five days, between January 13 and 18, 1878, he used the rules of a conservative church musician, but in a free way. The only one of his 13 completed Mass settings to be written in 8 parts, it exploits the sonorities made possible by these textures. Beginning with the two choirs in simple dialogue, Rheinberger creates frequent oppositions of high and low voices, as at the start of the Sanctus. Thus far, he had good models in the music of the 16th century polyphonists. He makes more dramatic use than they of unisons, as in the Credo, and contrast of homophonic and contrapuntal textures. The most remarkable texture is saved for the end: in Dona nobis pacemRheinberger puts a flowing motif heard in one part after another against slowly moving chords.
With historical imagination, the listener may sense what got up the noses of the Cecilians: things like the unprepared dissonances of the dominant seventh chords in the Agnus Dei. And perhaps in general, the vitality and control of this work of sustained inspiration. Rheinberger’s near-death credo, and this music, somewhat belie his by all accounts retiring, somewhat melancholy nature.
First published by Sydney Philharmonia Choirs, for concerts in October 2001