My Single Favorite Missa

 I don't believe it.

After ranting about Klemperer's famous Missa, I finally listen all the way through to his first recording of fifteen years before it, and along with Walter, it may be the most extraordinary Missa I've ever heard and, relatively speaking, in much better sound than Walter Klemperer's Missa is not a work of hope like in Jochum or joy like Bernstein or peace in Kleiber. It is, rather, a version that, like Beethoven, has not experienced such emotions but demands them as an inalienable right.

This approach is truly the best of both worlds. Its tempi are not all that different from Gardiner, but in place of an immaculately drilled and blended chorus we have the sort of chorus that surely Beethoven heard in his head. Unblended voices of extremely well-prepared amateurs, some of whom at times stick out of the composite like a frankfurter too long for its bun, but pronouncing Latin as Beethoven would have, along with an orchestra of particularly Viennese sounding instruments and the gut strings the Vienna Symphony, which was practically the last trad orchestra in the world to preserve a completely unreconstructed sound of pre-recorded epochs well into the stereo era.

The orchestral soloists cover themselves in glory - the actual soloists... can any soloists get a laurel wreath in this impossible to sing Everest (check out Masur's recording for the best singing)? This quartet comes as close as anyone ever has, but I wonder if Beethoven's Missa Solemnis is written to be impossible.

To me, this is the closest I've ever heard to the thing in itself: pure schwung and no sprawl, but no sense of drilling the human expression out of the work in the quest to nail its million technical demands; full of that mellow Viennese character, yet rising to every demand of divine fire. And not once does this famously sloppy orchestra come unglued even amid the most appassionata virtuosity (and unlike what a certain critic says, the beginning is quite together, the chord is just deliberately spread.)

...It always seems to be Walter and Klemperer standing alone at the top amid so many holy masterworks... Listen particularly to their radio broadcasts of Don Giovanni, Fidelio, Figaro, Deutsches Requiem, Zauberflote, and wonder if anyone was ever so profound in either before or since. A few get consistently close in multiple core repertoire Everests--the usual suspects of course: Erich Kleiber, Ferenc Fricsay, Eugen Jochum, Carlo Maria Giulini, Fritz Busch when he's available. But in both Walter and Klemperer, there's something in the atmosphere they generate--not an imposed vision but rather a simple reflection of the lofty but many sided way they viewed music itself. It's almost impossible to talk about, but one day I'd like to try.

Beethoven - Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Otto Klemperer – Missa Solemnis recorded from vinyl