Marcin Mielczewski: Opera omnia. Tom III: Msze koncertujące

The oeuvre of Marcin Mielczewski-both those works which have been preserved to this day, and those known only from inventories-shows that his main field of compositional activity was religious music. Among his religious compositions, an important place is occupied by masses composed both as polyphonic a cappella works, and as vocal and vocal-instrumental concertato works. We know that Mielczewski composed at least twenty four masses: eighteen concertato works and six a cappella with added basso continuo. Unfortunately, of the concertato masses, only two have been preserved in their entirety (i.e. as a complete cycle) up to our time: the Missa O Gloriosa Domina and the Missa Sancta Anna, another two masses have survived as incomplete cycles comprised of only two movements-Kyrie and Et in terra-namely, the Missa Triumphalis and the Missa Cerviensiana, from another five, individual parts have been preserved, and the titles of nine are known to us only from inventories. The masses for which all parts have survived show great variety in scoring. The six-voice Missa O Gloriosa Domina has the classic complement of voices with doubled soprano and tenor: 2CA2TB. The Missa Triumphalis has survived in one source as a composition for two four-voice choirs (CATB-CATB) with a six-part instrumental ensemble comprised of two violins and four trombones, according to another source, this is an eight-voice mass without instrumental ensemble. Most probably, the discarding of the instrumental ensemble in this second source is just a result of the contemporary performance practice of adapting scoring to the performance capabilities of a given ensemble. The Missa Cerviensiana was composed for six-voice choir (2CA2TB), a coro ripieno with the same voicing, and a six-part instrumental ensemble identical to the one in the Missa Triumphalis. Another mass with a similar-sized score is the Missa Sancta Anna. Its performance ensemble is comprised of six-voice choir (2CA2TB), coro cappella with the same voicing, and six-part instrumental ensemble consisting of two violins, three trombones and bassoon. In some manuscripts originating from Gdańsk, beyond this, an instrumental ensemble was added at that time, whose task was to double some of the existing parts, both vocal and instrumental. We do not include them here, for they only represent evidence of performance practice in Gdańsk. In the concertato masses known only from indirect sources, we can determine the scoring merely in the area of quantity of voices in the ensemble, sometimes quantity of vocal and instrumental parts. Of the masses known only by their titles, one is six-voice, two, eight-voice, three, twelve-voice (though in one of them [Missa Poloni], it is indicated that this twelve-voice scoring consists of six vocal and six instrumental parts, another, untitled, is placed in the group of masses cum instrumentis, thus, its scoring could have been just as in the Missa Poloni), and three, sixteen-voice. In the group of masses from which only individual parts have been preserved, one of them is five-voice (classic complement of voices with doubled tenor), two, eight-voice bi-choral with classic complement of voices CATB-CATB, two, twelve-voice: one of them (Missa concertata secundi toni) is composed for two six-voice (2CA2TB-2CA2TB) choirs, however, the other (of which only the basso continuo part has been preserved), is described as a 6 et 12. We cannot determine today whether this is an only six-voice work, or whether it was composed for six vocal and six instrumental parts-which would be probable, in that six vocal and the same number of instrumental parts is the most typical scoring in Mielczewski's works. 

Ed. by Zygmunt M. Szweykowski