Martin's affair with God
The a cappella mass for double choir by Frank Martin has been published in a well-founded and practical edition.
Frank Martin is one of the most important Swiss composers. As the son of a Calvinist pastor in Geneva, he was influenced early on by Bach's Passions, Schumann's Lieder and César Franck's modal harmony. Under the influence of Debussy, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, he broke away from functional tonality and developed his own tonal language, which is characterized by singability and transparency.
His Mass for double choir contains many of these influences and is one of the most popular a cappella works of the 20th century. It was composed in 1922 (Rome) and 1926 (Zurich). Martin's manuscripts from the 1920s (now in the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel) then disappeared into a drawer for 40 years. As he himself emphasized, they were never intended for publication, but were «a matter between God and me».
The German composer Michael Ostrzyga has published an exemplary Urtext edition with Bärenreiter-Verlag. It reassesses the composition and performance history of the mass and for the first time takes into account all sources, including a previously unknown radio recording from 1970 with the composer present. We have been waiting for such a scholarly and practical edition for a long time. Highly recommended!
Frank Martin: Messe pour double Chœur a cappella, edited by Michael Ostrzyga, score, BA 11315, € 16.50, Bärenreiter, Kassel
