In 1932, Joseph Messner, director of the Musical Chapel of the Cathedral of Salzburg, commissioned Gnecchi to compose a mass: the Missa Salisburgensis was born, dedicated to the Prince Archbishop of the city.
The Italian tradition in Salzburg
An important work in the panorama of Italian sacred music, but also for the history of the Salzburg musical tradition, the Missa was performed for the first time in the Cathedral of Salzburg on July 23, 1933, conducted by Messner himself and featuring the Viennese soprano Erika Rokita as soloist. Gnecchi’s pages tie up the threads of an ancient tradition that entrusted Italian musicians with the composition of sacred works for the Cathedral.
The success of the Missa is unanimous and the international press hails the work as one of the most interesting modern works of sacred music. The "Salzburger Chronik" even announces the birth of a "new style", almost the advent of a "Palestrina in modern guise".
The critic Karl Neumayr closes his long review of the concert as follows: "July 23, 1933 marks a milestone in the history of the Salzburg Cathedral Choir. For Gnecchi's Missa Salisburgensis is the most important work of sacred music of the new Italy, and it is also the first great work that the immortal Italian genius, after the eventful Benevoli Mass (1628), dedicated to Salzburg Cathedral."
The Missa Salisburgensis is in effect imposing for its new style, a mixture of German drama and Italian opera, always devoted to the liturgical text. Profound humanity and supreme grandeur merge into a careful musical balance, an expression of the harmony of the "divine" with the "earthly".
Gnecchi starts, almost like a leitmotif, from some lines of the chorale by Paulus Hofhaimer (1459-1537), whose notes resound every day from the heights of the fortress of Salzburg. Notes that found the Prelude and open the "Kyrie", giving way to a polyphonic game between choir and soprano, until they rise in the ecstatic momentum of the "Christe Eleison".
A pure and religious sentiment kept far from any emphasis, even in the "Gloria", which announces itself in its appeal for peace, like a fugato that bows to the severe form of classical polyphony. Mystical is the momentum of the solo soprano, but calm is the lyricism that unfolds in slow movements until it reaches the explosion of the final grandiose hymn, and in the "Amen" echo the notes of Hofhaimer's Chorale.
Then tenors and basses intone the "Credo", where the mystery of the Incarnation is treated masterfully but also with the humility of the believer, almost realistically stically sculpting the image of the resurrection in the words of a prayer that touches the heart.
With the "Sanctus" we reach the apex of the work: it is a masterly page, in fugato style, in which the unforgettable emotion of the soprano's solo alternates with the marvelous logic underlying the entire construction. Then the "Benedictus", not by chance infused with timid, almost Mozartian sweetnesses; and finally the pure and almost romantic "Agnus", wrapped in a halo of dramatic lyricism, which dissolves in the quivering and suave theme of the concluding "Dona pacem".
