The Mass is a musical work on the unchanging Latin texts of the principal Catholic service: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei. For centuries the Mass was the central genre of European sacred music and the arena of the highest compositional achievements.
From the perfect Renaissance polyphony of Palestrina and Josquin des Prez, through the grandiose Mass in B minor by J.S. Bach — one of the summits of world music — to the solemn Masses of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven (“Missa solemnis”), and Schubert. The Mass combines the strictness of a canon with a boundless space for musical expression. Kindred to it is the Mass for the dead — the requiem. In the Orthodox tradition the counterpart of the Mass is the Liturgy, to which the Ukrainian classics Bortniansky, Berezovsky, and Vedel also turned.
