23/08/2026
- A Duet for Three
The Trinitarian mystery of the Domine Deus in the Mass in B minor
First part
At the heart of the Gloria of Bach’s Mass in B minor lies a piece that, at first glance, presents itself as an elegant galant-style duet for soprano and tenor. But the closer one looks, the more it reveals a theological and compositional depth of extraordinary complexity.
In this instalment of our Musical Insights series, we enter the heart of the Domine Deus, the fifth movement of the Gloria, placed at the exact centre of a nine-movement structure. A position that, as we shall see, is far from coincidental: Bach constructs the entire Mass by always placing the figure of Christ as the load-bearing axis of each of its great sections.
We will explore the two voices that dialogue while exchanging the roles of Father and Son, the traverso flute that embroiders melodies above them and an apparently simple question that conceals philological, acoustic and theological implications of quite another order: one flute or two?
And then we will do something unusual: we will listen to the same piece in two contrasting performances, Karl Richter and Ton Koopman, to understand concretely what it means today to perform Bach in a historically informed way, and why this choice radically transforms the character of the music.
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