Johann Adolf HASSE (1699-1783)Mass for 4 solo voices, choir and orchestra in d minor* (1751) [34:08]
Miserere for 4 voices, choir and orchestra in c minor** (c1730, second version) [21:39]
Mária Zádori (soprano), Lena Susanne Norin (contralto)*, Kai Wessel (alto)**, Wilfried Jochens**, Hans Jörg Mammel* (tenor), Klaus Mertens*, Stephan Schreckenberger** (bass)
Rheinische Kantorei, Das Kleine Konzert/Hermann Max
rec. April 1993**, April 1995*, Zeughaus in Neuss, Germany. DDD
CAPRICCIO C 5125 [55:47]
There is a peculiar justice in the neglect of Johann Adolf Hasse. He was, for roughly four decades in the middle of the eighteenth century, the most celebrated composer in Europe — which is to say, the composer most perfectly calibrated to the desires of the people who paid for music. Courts adored him. Singers adored him more. And when the world changed — when Gluck arrived with his reforms, when the Viennese Classical style began to assert its structural ambitions — Hasse simply receded, like a tide going out. He lived until 1783, long enough to watch Mozart render him obsolete. The old man reportedly said, after hearing Die Entführung aus dem Serail, that this boy would cause all of them to be forgotten. He was right. He was talking about himself.
Which makes these two sacred works — the Miserere and a companion piece, both associated with the Dresden court where Hasse served as Kapellmeister from 1733 — something of an archaeological expedition. What survives? What justifies excavation?
More than you might expect. Less than the liner notes suggest.
The Miserere has a complicated history that the performance here negotiates with only partial success. Originally composed around 1730 for Venice — almost certainly for one of the ospedali, those extraordinary institutions where orphaned and illegitimate girls received rigorous musical training and gave concerts that left visiting aristocrats slack-jawed — the piece was scored for two sopranos and two altos, a sonority that would have bloomed naturally in those resonant Venetian spaces. The adaptation for Dresden, with its standard SATB forces, normalizes something that was genuinely unusual. You hear the seams.
Hasse came to Dresden by way of Hamburg, where he was born, and Naples, where he learned to write for the voice with a fluency that his contemporaries found almost supernatural. He had started his career as a tenor — which meant he understood the instrument from the inside — and then married Faustina Bordoni in 1730, one of the great sopranos of the age, a woman who had famously brawled onstage with her rival Francesca Cuzzoni during a London performance. Hasse wrote for her constantly. The solo lines in this Miserere have exactly the kind of supple, long-breathed elegance that Faustina would have worn like a second skin.
Charles Burney, who heard everything and forgot nothing, called Hasse the most skillful and elegant of all modern composers of vocal music. Burney was right about the elegance. Whether elegance is enough — that is the question the Miserere keeps raising and not quite answering.
The problem is theological, or rather the absence of it. Take “Tibi soli peccavi” — “Against thee only have I sinned.” It’s a bass aria, and it arrives with the full apparatus of a da capo showpiece: ornamented melodic line, shapely ritornellos, a harmonic language that never gets darker than a briefly clouded major key. The penitential anguish of Psalm 51 is simply not present. What is present is a beautifully crafted piece of music that might as easily accompany a nobleman’s declaration of love in Act II of some forgotten opera seria. Hasse wrote some sixty operas — the Grove worklist is staggering — and the sacred music never entirely leaves that world behind. This isn’t necessarily a failure; Bach’s Magnificat is scarcely tortured either. But Bach’s counterpoint creates its own kind of structural gravity. Hasse’s bel canto floats free.
There are moments, though. The opening sections of “Ecce enim in iniquitatibus” carry a genuine harmonic unease, a sense that something uncomfortable is being acknowledged — briefly, gracefully, but acknowledged. And the “Gloria Patri,” a solo for alto that ends with an extended cadenza on “Sancto,” is ravishing in a way that bypasses theological argument entirely. The voice just ascends, and you go with it.
The instrumental writing is where Hasse most consistently rewards attention. The orchestral ritornellos have a cleanness of line, an almost Mozartian clarity — though saying that inverts the historical causality, since it was Mozart who absorbed lessons from this generation, not the other way around. The string textures are light without being thin. There is never any mud.
The interpretation here is committed and technically polished, and the solo singing has real distinction in places — the alto in the “Gloria Patri” finds exactly the right mix of warmth and restraint. The ensemble playing is clean and well-judged for the scale of the music. My reservations have less to do with execution than with interpretive depth: this is music that rewards a maestro willing to push at its edges, to find the moments of shadow and let them breathe, and the approach here tends toward the presentable rather than the revelatory.
Hasse deserves periodic revival, the way Donizetti deserves periodic revival — not because he is equal to the greatest masters, but because the greatest masters grew up listening to him, and understanding what they rejected (or absorbed) tells us something real. This disc makes the case competently. It doesn’t make it compellingly. For now, that may have to do.
