Bach finished his B-minor Mass the year before he died
Johann Sebastian Bach completed the Mass in B minor, BWV 232, in 1749, recycling earlier music such as a 1724 Sanctus into a full Latin Ordinary. His son C. P. E. listed it as the “Great Catholic Mass.” Bach’s own manuscript entered UNESCO’s Memory of the World in 2015.
Formatted like a Neapolitan mass, it alternates large choruses with solo numbers over reduced bands. For a Lutheran, writing a Missa tota was exceptional: local masses usually stopped at Kyrie and Gloria, and Bach already had five such pairs before expanding this one. It runs about two hours and calls for five soloists, a choir often split into five parts and doubled for the Osanna, and an orchestra rich in winds and brass. Natural trumpets in D make B minor an odd choice of key, and in fact more of the music sits in D major. The Et incarnatus est was among the sections newly written in the late 1740s.
After Augustus II died on 1 February 1733, months of mourning halted public music; Bach used the pause to craft a Latin Missa. Late in life he enlarged it to the complete Ordinary—perhaps, some scholars guess, for Dresden’s new Hofkirche, though motives remain debated. Bach took the Kyrie and Gloria to Dresden in July 1733, hoping the newly Catholic Augustus III would name him court composer, and grumbled in the inscription about injuries suffered in Leipzig. The title finally came in 1736.
Bach died in July 1750, and the cathedral was not finished until 1751, so Johann Adolph Hasse's Mass in D minor was heard at the dedication instead. Bach's complete Mass was probably never performed in his lifetime; the first documented full performance came in 1859. Today it is one of his most popular vocal works, with dozens of recordings, and his autograph score is kept at the Berlin State Library.
Source: Mass in B minor
