Die MISSA (1984–87) von Dieter Schnebel

In the early 1950s, the composer and theologian Dieter Schnebel was part of a circle of European composers who had decisively broken with the musical past. Contrary to the maxim of music detached from tradition that shaped the spirit of the Darmstadt School, Schnebel increasingly succumbed to his love for European music history in the 1970s. As part of his cycle Tradition (1975–2011), he created a multitude of compositions that, due to their construction as avant-garde works rooted in tradition, reveal a fascinatingly ambivalent content. His ecumenically oriented Latin Mass, the MISSA for soloists, choir, and orchestra (1984–1987), reflects an attempt to make new music “transparent in the direction of tradition.” Its dialectical program intertwines avant-garde logic of progress with a theological return to the traditional. Its musical-serial concept unites a variety of historical compositional techniques and reveals echoes of the entire tradition of sacred music, from the masses of Guillaume de Machaut to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge. This publication marks the first monograph on the MISSA, serving as an introduction to central aspects of its musical and theological content.

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