Franz Schubert’s Mass in G, written when he was seventeen, was a great success for the young composer. Now an authoritative new edition complete with practical performing material has been published in the Complete Edition.

Franz Schubert’s second “Mass in G” (D 167) was composed in March 1815, six months after the young composer’s first major success with his “Mass in F” (D 105), which had been performed in September 1814 on the 100th anniversary of the Parish Church in the Vienna suburb of Lichtental.

The “Mass in G” was initially intended as a “Missa brevis” with strings and organ for Sunday use. However, shortly after writing the autograph score, the composer produced a set of parts of the Mass which also included trumpets and timpani ad lib. This suggests that it was also performed on feast days. Whilst copying out the parts, Schubert revised these in many places. But the differences compared with his score are largely practical performing variants. Nevertheless, the expanded scoring with trumpets and timpani gives the Mass a different character which seems relevant not only for liturgical use. In addition, the parts contain a cut in the Credo probably made during the first performances (cf. bars 133–140 in the first version with bars 133–137 in the second version). Thus, the two versions of the Mass can be distinguished from each other, without being able to define the later version of the set of parts as a more mature one, or the original version of the autograph score as the one actually intended and only revised for practical purposes. In the reception of the Mass in G to date, the two versions have frequently been combined. The edition published in 2025 in the New Schubert Edition separates the two versions consistently for the first time, thus enabling a new insight into the development and historical performance practice of this work.

Schubert’s early masses have unjustly been categorised as purely functional music. Even if the Mass in G appears simple in extent and scoring, the composer succeeded in achieving a particularly powerful and concise musical interpretation of the mass text in the concise form of the Missa brevis. The catchy melodies are elevated above any sense of the ordinary by unusual harmonic twists, such as when the innocent Kyrie melody surprisingly modulates to the subdominant minor key in the repetition, or when each plea in the Agnus Dei modulates to the parallel major key as early as the second bar. An example of Schubert’s compositional approach is the Credo, which follows a tradition cultivated in Vienna known as the “Credo Mass”. The choral declamation to a continuous, contrapuntally set bass part recalls the church music style of the “old” masters and thereby indirectly compensates for the omission of a fugue at the end of the movement. At the same time, the Creed, largely declaimed in pianissimo, suggests a new attitude among the faithful in the early 19th century, one imbued with respect, wonder and possibly also doubt. Whether this also concurred with the composer’s personal beliefs can only be a matter of conjecture.

As in all of Schubert’s Masses, in the Mass in G there are also omissions of particular parts of the liturgical text, which were much discussed with regard to their theological significance, but were tacitly tolerated in church music practice in the 19th century. They were probably not a decisive factor in the restrained reception of Schubert’s Masses in Viennese church music of his day. Rather, at that time Viennese parishes generally favoured a conservative repertoire, orientated stylistically towards composers such as Mozart, Joseph and Michael Haydn, who were felt to be classicists, whereas more modern church music was heard less often. Only in the later 19th century was Schubert’s Mass in G rediscovered and it has enjoyed unbroken popularity since then.    

Christine Martin
(from [t]akte 1/2026)
(translation: Elizabeth Robinson)