This superb, powerful work, an isolated setting of the opening section of the Ordinary of the Mass, remains the subject of much mystery and scholarly debate. Otto Jahn, Mozart's first great biographer, assigned the work to a period dating from between November 1780 and March 1781, when the composer was in Munich for the first performances of Idomeneo. This attribution, made principally on the basis of the inclusion of clarinets (not available in Salzburg), has been followed by all editions of Köchel's catalog. More recently it has been suggested that the work dates from much later, possibly even as late as 1788, a time when Mozart was hoping to be appointed Kapellmeister of St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna and composed a number of fragments of sacred works. However, if the work was in the complete state known today, it seems inconceivable that he would have not have entered it in the thematic catalog he started in 1784. The suspicion that the Kyrie may have been completed by another hand is given added weight by the marking of "tutti" in the contemporary copy, a clear indication that soloists would emerge at some point. But they never do, leaving this richly scored and superbly constructed choral movement, in the words of its composer's biographer Alfred Einstein, "enough to make one fall to one's knees".



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