It is perhaps the most accomplished masterpiece of Baroque sacred music, a work of intoxicating choral beauty and dazzling arias. The origin of this famous Mass in B minor is fascinating. It was completed by Bach in Leipzig around 1748, two years before his death, by assembling his Missa Brevis of 1733 (a Kyrie and a Gloria dedicated to the Elector of Saxony, for the glittering Catholic Court of Dresden) with various pieces already written, notably the Sanctus dated Christmas 1724, but also with new compositions, to form what his son Carl Philipp Emanuel called the “Great Catholic Mass”. It is in a way a theoretical work, whose destination was not dictated by a precise performance objective: Bach would thus have achieved his great work, a sacred musical sum after fifty years dedicated to cantatas and passions… 

Published only in 1833, the complete work was certainly not performed during Bach’s lifetime, but in the 19th century it became a symbol of compositional mastery, and with the Baroque revival an essential work of the German Baroque and of universal music, placed on the same level as his St Matthew Passion.

In Bach’s oeuvre, this great “Latin” mass is opposed by its splendour to the Protestant passions. The heady sorrow of the Crucifixus, in which each voice weeps for Christ, is followed by the intoxicating Resurrexit, with all the brass and timpani out, carried away by the joyful clamour of the faithful. Bach’s musical testament, it is now one of his most performed works. Sir John Eliot Gardiner is its absolute cantor, at the head of the Monteverdi Choir, which is the best choir in the world in this exceptional repertoire, provoking an aesthetic shock across the centuries.