It is a real treat when Romantic sacred music appears on CD. It is even more gratifying when music by E. T. A. Hoffmann makes a rare entry into a record label’s list. For both those reasons, this 2010 recording (released early in 2014) by WDR/CPO with the West German Radio Chorus and Symphony Orchestra of Cologne, conducted by Rupert Huber, deserves special commendation.

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776–1822) is mostly remembered today as an author and music critic rather than as a composer. His novellas and short stories explored the world of the fantastic and the uncanny, and served as inspiration for generations of artists. Schumann’s Kreisleriana paid homage to Hoffmann’s alter ego, the fictional Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler; Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann was based on several of his short tales; Delibes’s Coppélia and Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballets owe their inspiration to some of his most imaginative stories, as does Hindemith’s opera Cardillac.

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, Hoffmann pioneered a type of music criticism that bordered on literature. Like other early Romantic thinkers (such as the Schlegel brothers), he helped circumscribe the essence of German musical Romanticism, an amalgam of music, literature, poetry and philosophical thought. Among his influential writings for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung of Leipzig, the essay on Beethoven’s instrumental music (based on his famous 1810 review of the Fifth Symphony) takes centre stage. In it we find the codification of music’s superiority among other arts: ‘Music is the most romantic of all the arts – one might almost say, the only genuinely romantic one – for its sole subject is the infinite’. It is no coincidence, then, that music occupied a central place in his life.

In spite of a career in law and a number of bureaucratic positions, Hoffmann was active as a composer throughout his life. He is primarily known for his opera Undine (1816) and a small number of chamber works. Although he was a quite prolific composer of vocal and instrumental music, many of his compositions (especially his stage works and sacred music) have been lost. His remaining oeuvre attests to a fertile and creative artistic impulse, but one that remained largely unimaginative when placed along the composers he championed – namely, Mozart and Beethoven.

Of his sacred compositions only three have survived: the Mass in D minor for chorus and orchestra (1803–05), 6 Canzoni for a cappella chorus (1808), and the Miserere in B-flat minor for soloists, chorus and orchestra (1809). This CD release brings together the Mass and the Miserere, works that conform to the symphonic style of sacred music championed by many early romantics. A fervent Catholic, Hoffmann lived under Prussia-occupied Poland for six years, and he completed the Mass after his administrative transfer to Warsaw in 1804. By Hoffmann’s time, sacred music had been in decline, a fact that he famously debated in his influential article ‘Old and New Church Music’ (‘Alte und neue Kirchenmusik’), published in 1814 in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung.Footnote ¹ In this essay he stipulated that composers did not write church music any longer because ‘in the last half of the eighteenth century increasing enfeeblement and sickly sweetness finally overcame art …, keeping step with so-called enlightened attitudes, which killed every deeper religious impulse’.Footnote ² He lamented the decline of church music after the Baroque period, and he argued that composers of his time lacked the ‘divine spark’ and ‘inner glow from which in everlasting incandescence true works of art arise’.Footnote ³ He, however, seemed to be criticizing not the lack of religious music per se, but the lack of spiritual dignity in church music of the time. He saw in Palestrina’s church music an ‘austere, noble style …, the sincere and dignified expression of a spirit fired by the most ardent devotion’.Footnote ⁴ He concluded that ‘Haydn’s masses and church hymns cannot stand as models of church style, particularly compared with that truly sacred music of former times which has now vanished from the earth’.Footnote ⁵ Hoffmann acknowledged only two masterpieces of genuine sacred music of ‘former times’: Handel’s Messiah and Mozart’s Requiem. Interestingly, Beethoven’s Mass in C was not included in this canon of great sacred works, although he commended it just one year before the appearance of the aforementioned article. Unlike the ‘rationalistic’ masses of Haydn, Beethoven’s Mass betrayed individuality and subjectivity, qualities that Hoffmann excessively praised.

Although completed years before the publication of ‘Old and New Church Music’, Hoffmann’s Mass and Miserere cannot but be viewed in the context of his own attitudes toward church music. Both works employ orchestra in addition to soloists and chorus, and conspicuously resemble the predominant symphonic style of church music he later rejected. In fact, it is difficult to listen to these works and not hear echoes of Mozart’s Requiem and Haydn’s late masses. The creators of this CD decided to use a three-minute overture in the French style that Hoffmann had composed in 1801. As Werner Keil notes in his informative liner notes, the Overture: Musica per la chiesa was written for a different mass that was never completed; since it ends ‘on a half cadence in A, it serves quite well (as on this recording) as the introduction [to the Mass] even though it was not originally intended for it’.

The treatment of the text is quite liberal in both the Mass and the Miserere. The texture alternates freely between choral and solo parts, and occasional homophony often gives way to contrapuntal episodes of great variety. The West German Radio Chorus and Symphony Orchestra of Cologne, conducted by Rupert Huber, admirably navigate the treacherous waters between the orchestra’s sonic power and the clear delivery of the text by chorus and soloists. Soloists Sibylla Rubens, Jutta Böhnert, Rebecca Martin, Thomas Cooley and York Felix Speer offer crystal-clear interpretations, and the entire recording seems to be imbued less with spirituality than with a secular essence that emphasizes the two works’ conspicuous religiosity.

The text of the Latin Ordinary constitutes the most frequently set sacred text. In the Mass in D minor one may find a traditional treatment of the text that conforms to commonplace musical-rhetorical devices: words such as ‘descendit’ and ‘ascendit’ are given their meaning in musical space, whereas celebratory and mournful passages (especially in the Credo) find an appropriate musical analogue. Sections of a truly galant ethos permeate the music and beautifully synthesize with fugal episodes (at the end of the Gloria and Credo) and a Romantic sacred-symphonic impulse (Kyrie and Agnus Dei).

The Miserere in B-flat minor was composed in Bamberg, in the early months of 1809. The text comes from Psalm 50, ‘Miserere mei, Deus’ (‘Have mercy on me, O God’), and Hoffmann set 11 of the 21 verses. Polyphonic settings of the Miserere had existed since the sixteenth century and were often sung for the service of Tenebrae. Probably the most notable example belongs to Gregorio Allegri (1582–1652), whose setting for two choirs attracted intense fascination, from Mozart and Charles Burney (who published it for the first time in 1770) to Goethe and Mendelssohn. Hoffmann himself discussed Allegri’s work in his 1814 essay as representative of the lofty ‘Palestrina style’. The treatment of the text is quite liberal, full of repetitions. As in the Mass, the texture varies greatly, and in this performance the five soloists and chorus do a tremendous job of articulating the nuances of the text. The synergy between conductor, orchestra, chorus and soloists is evident throughout.

Hoffmann may not have succeeded in gaining prominence as a composer, but one cannot underestimate his contributions as one of the most significant thinkers of early musical Romanticism. Contradictions aside, the Mass and Miserere include a kaleidoscopic summary of most tropes associated with concerted sacred music in the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the listeners of this CD may find themselves intrigued to explore additional works in this continuum of glorious sacred-symphonic tradition.