Beethoven and Bach's B Minor Mass

It is, in fact, unknown whether or not Beethoven owned or ever saw a copy of the B Minor Mass. Lewis Lockwood (Beethoven: The Music and the Life, Norton, 2003) thinks he probably did; George Stauffer (Bach, the mass in B minor: the great Catholic mass, Prentice Hall, 1997). thinks he probably didn't. The facts are these. In 1810, Beethoven wrote to his publisher Breitkopf and Haertel asking that some of his payment from them be in the form of musical scores; he asked for Bach's Mass in B Minor, Bach's Well-tempered Clavier and the complete works of C.P.E. Bach. In this letter he quotes the first four bars of the Crucifixus from the Mass, which presumably he has seen quoted somewhere else. However, though the publisher had a large collection of scores, they did not have the B Minor Mass.

In September 1824, Beethoven wrote to the composer and music publisher Hans Georg Nägeli, again asking for a copy. Nägeli was a huge enthusiast for the B Minor Mass; he bought the manuscript of the Mass from the heir of C.P.E. Bach with the intent of editing it and publishing it, and in 1818, he published an advertisement in which he called the work, "The Greatest Musical Work of All Times and All People". Whether Nägeli ever sent any version of the Mass to Beethoven is unknown. Beethoven died in 1827; there was no copy of the Mass among his effects. Nägeli published the first half of the mass in 1833. He died in 1836. The whole mass was not published until 1854. (Rathey, 2003)

There was a read-through performance of the whole mass in Berlin in 1813. The first complete public performance of the Mass was in 1859 in Leipzig, more than a century after Bach's death.

Intermezzo with Arik