(V) Liturgical music.

Although he was a devout Catholic and frequently conducted the liturgical music for the Catholic court in Dresden, Weber's output of sacred music is small, comprising only three settings of the Roman Mass and associated Proper offertories for two of them. The so-called Grosse Jugendmesse, discovered in the 1920s (Schneider, N1926), is one of the few juvenilia to have survived Weber's probable destruction of much of his earliest music. Weber claimed to have written the piece under Kalcher's supervision in Munich, and he assigned the mass to 1799 in his own (admittedly unreliable) work-list; however, an autograph dedication dated 1802 is attached to a score (now at Český Krumlov) prepared by a Salzburg copyist, and the contrapuntal writing that informs the Gloria, the polytextual ‘Pleni sunt … Osanna’ movement and the Agnus Dei seems to point to Michael Haydn's influence (Rosenthal, N1926–7). What is more, unorthodox text setting and formal features raise the possibility that some of the music was based on lost instrumental pieces (Veit, N1993).

Weber composed the two mature masses of his early Dresden years in accordance with tacit expectations that a royal Saxon Kapellmeister would supply liturgical music for the court (Allroggen, N1993), whose exclusive property they became, and calculated these pieces for the liturgy, acoustics and forces of the Hofkirche, which he described to Gänsbacher in letters of 24 December 1818 and 26 December 1822. Despite formal similarities with each other, like the treatment of the Credo as a continuous movement in one tempo, the two masses explore rather strongly contrasted qualities of expression and character. The Mass in E , written for the king's nameday in 1818, is the more festive. Sometimes known as the ‘Freischützmesse’ because of certain affinities with the opera, the Mass also draws on some of Weber's earlier music: the Kyrie and Christe are based, respectively, on the Kyrie of the Jugendmesse and the Trauer-Musik j116 of 1811, and three contrapuntal passages (‘Cum sanctu spiritu’, ‘Et incarnatus est’ and ‘Osanna’) borrow subjects and counterpoint from the early fughettas of op.1. In contrast, the G major Mass, composed for the golden wedding anniversary of the king and queen in 1819, offers a more intimate and pastoral interpretation of the liturgical text, with less emphasis on learned counterpoint and dramatic effects (see Weber's letters of 16 October 1818 and 14 December 1818 to Rochlitz and Friederike Koch, respectively). More obviously than the E Mass, the G major featured the great soloists of the court chapel, with extended solos for tenor (the ‘Qui tollis peccata’ section of the Gloria), soprano (a highly expressive setting of ‘Et incarnatus est’) and alto (the pastorale-like Agnus Dei); the Benedictus, which the Weber scholar F.W. Jähns (A1871) considered the ‘pearl’ of the score, is given to the quartet of soloists. The two florid offertories composed in conjunction with these masses also demonstrate the virtuoso abilities of the castrato Giovanni Sassaroli.