Sacred Music  

        Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert were all Catholics who wrote masses for their patrons, but, for the most part, they seem rather secular, and are not much used in church worship.  Haydn's were cheerful works, for he said that at the thought of God his heart leaped for joy, and he could not help his music doing the same.  Most of Mozart's church music, including his masses, was composed for the Archbishop of Salzburg, and is rather conventional in style.  But the Requiem Mass, which he left unfinished on his deathbed, is much more deeply felt.  Beethoven's greatest sacred work is his 'Solemn Mass' in D major, written on a large-scale -for public performance in the concert room.  Schubert's 6 masses, like his other church music, are rather perfunctory and are rarely performed, though the one in G is quite popular.  

    The best-known sacred work of the Viennese period is Haydn's oratorio 'The Creation'.  It was the fruit of his second visit to London, where he heard and was impressed by Handel's oratorios.  He was given an English libretto, compiled from the Bible and Milton's "Paradise Lost", and took it back to Vienna, where he had it translated into German.  He was 64 when he started to compose the work and he said "Never was I so pious.  I knelt down each day and prayed God to give me strength to finish the work." It contains some delightfully vivid tone pictures, and the orchestra plays a much more important part than in any oratorio of Handel's.