Musica sacra

Description

This generous box set brings together the complete recordings of Josef Rheinberger’s sacred music published by Carus. In other words, the complete edition of this corpus of some forty works. Born in 1839 in Vaduz, Liechtenstein, Rheinberger spent his entire life as a composition professor at the Munich Conservatory. He trained many musicians, including Engelbert Humperdinck, ErmannoWolf Ferrari, the American Horatio Parker, and conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. Sadly, his work as a composer remained little known because of the radical change in aesthetics that took place at the turn of the century. Music was no longer the business of craftsmen, however gifted they might be, but took on an idiosyncratic dimension. The breath of Romanticism prevailed, leaving behind the classicism inherited from Bach and Mozart, which critics would soon regard as a backward-looking academicism. Rheinberger’s abundant corpus of sacred music, which can easily be compared to Mendelssohn’s, includes several masses, a cantata, a Stabat Mater, three Requiems, and numerous choral pieces: hymns and motets. Convinced that he had “a certain talent and inclination for sensual church music of noble spirit” (he wrote his first mass at the age of seven!), Rheinberger strove in his music to embody, and throughout his life to revive, the expression of biblical text. He uses an effective vocabulary (homophony, polyphony, counterpoint, omnipresent and always soberly developed). The “musical discourse” is never grandiloquent, but softened by prayer and introspection. By going through these ten discs, one can follow its evolution. From Op. 69 (1864), a few bars of the choir on a Lied text, to the final mass, unfinished at the Credo (describing the death and resurrection of Jesus: … passus et sepulptus est et resurrexit.) The various German (and Canadian) ensembles, choirs and soloists involved in this box set shed new and refined light on these scores, in the image of the performance of the Christmas cantata Der Stern von Bethleem by a legendary duo: Fischer-Dieskau and Rita Streich. (Jérôme Angouillant)