One of Felix Mendelssohn's best-known historical contributions to music was his championing of older music, especially that of Johann Sebastian Bach. (He organized the first performance of the "St. Matthew Passion" in generations.) The Romantic Era became the first period in musical history where reverence for great masters of the past and frequent revival of their music was the norm.

This work may have had its origin in the composer's hearing a Mass in 16 voices by early Baroque composer Orazio Benevoli (1605-1672). A Berlin royal Kapellmeister, Reichard (1752-1814) had bought a copy of this mass and his colleague C.F.C. Fasch, founder of the Berlin Singakademie, was fond of it, scheduled it frequently, and even wrote a 16-part choral work of his own.

Mendelssohn's work has the voices divided into four choruses. Mendelssohn uses these forces with exceptional skills, accepting and overcoming the difficulties of writing for such a medium, which are considerable. The result is a high point of polyphonic (and polychoral) vocal writing of his time. Mendelssohn seems to have been stimulated by the imagery of the text, which described the arrival of the hour when the dead are to rise from their slumber to Christ. This exceptional work, written when the composer was twenty, deserved wider attention.



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