- Date: 1824 12
- Composer: Hector Berlioz
- Period: Romantic (1820-1869)
Review
Throughout 1824, Berlioz was trying to inure his family to his abandonment of medicine for music, while the autumn was given to a setting of the Mass, with his teacher, the eminent composer Jean François Le Sueur (1760 - 1837), looking over his shoulder and offering encouragement. On completion, Berlioz discovered that it was expensive beyond his means to produce. He hoped to cut corners by enlisting volunteers to copy parts and to sing. A rehearsal proved disastrous, as the error-ridden materials were found to be worse than useless, but it was a lesson learned. Berlioz copied the parts himself. A fellow Gluck enthusiast, Augustin de Pons, loaned him 1,200 francs, and Berlioz set about engaging soloists, chorus, orchestra, and Henri Valentino, from the Opéra, to conduct. The performance at St.-Roch, on Sunday, July 10, 1825, was a public and critically acclaimed success, drawing from Le Sueur the prophecy, "You'll not be a doctor nor an apothecary, but a great composer."Berlioz claimed to have burned the Messe solennelle. Scholars assumed for well over a century that the work, but for the Resurrexit, was lost. In 1991, Franz Moors, a schoolteacher, searching for Mozart's "Coronation" Mass in the organ loft of Antwerp's Saint Charles Borromeus Church, stumbled across the full score of the Messe solennelle, with the inscription "The score of this Mass, entirely in Berlioz's hand, was given to me as a souvenir of the long-standing friendship that binds me to him." It is signed "A. Bessems, Paris 1835." Bessems, a Belgian violinist, was a classmate of Berlioz's at the Paris Conservatoire. The first public performance of the Messe solennelle since Berlioz's own revival at Saint Eustache in 1827, was given by John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Monteverdi Choir and the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique at the Church of St. Petri, Bremen, on October 3, 1993.
This first extensive work surviving from Berlioz's apprentice days is most immediately notable for the wealth of ideas which would reappear in later works. The brassy skeleton which emerges suddenly in the Resurrexit, and which, greatly enlarged, furnished the great solemn fanfares of the Dies irae in the Requiem (1837), is perhaps the most salient example, but that is flanked by music which will be heard again in the Te Deum and Benvenuto Cellini. And those are but several of the dozens of pre-echoes, so to speak, with which the Messe solennelle is rife. ~ Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide
Albums with Complete Performances of the Work
| Title | Date |
| Berlioz Rediscovered [DVD Video] | 2007 |
| Berlioz: Messe Solennelle | |
| Berlioz: Messe Solennelle | 1994 |
| Berlioz: Messe Solennelle | 2001 |
| Berlioz: Messe solennelle H20 |
Albums with Excerpt Performances of the Work
| Title | Date |
| En avant-première, les grandes nouveautés de l'année, 1994 | |
| Hector Berlioz, Romantic Spirit | 2003 |
