Haydn ‘Nelson Mass’
Concert details
This year’s Winter Concert will include Haydn’s Nelson Mass, perhaps the most well-known and most celebrated of the six masses, written near the end of his life, that are seen as a culmination of Haydn’s composition of liturgical music. It was composed at a time of intense fear for the future of Austria as Napoleon had defeated the Austrian army in four major battles, crossing the Alps and threatening Vienna. Haydn called the work the Missa in Angustiis or Mass for Troubled Times, but almost on the date of the first performance the British defeated the French navy in the Battle of the Nile and Nelson was heralded as the ‘saviour of Europe’. Perhaps because of this coincidence the Mass gradually acquired the name which it still carries today, but the title became firmly fixed when in 1800, Nelson himself visited the Esterhazy court where Haydn was based, and met the composer.