The Carmel Bach Festival pays homage to three historic compositions crafted during a time of political and personal upheaval.

FOR THE LAST NINE DECADES, THE CARMEL BACH FESTIVAL HAS BEEN PRESENTING TIMELESS MUSIC BY THE BIGGEST STAR OF THE BAROQUE ERA – Johann Sebastian Bach. But even though Bach, with more than a thousand pieces written, was a peculiarly prolific composer, his presence in the festival’s program has always been supported by other big names, from the other composers of the German Baroque period to the biggest stars of the Classical and Romantic era and, more often in recent years, present-day pieces.

Regarding Bach, it is fair to say that his central work to be showcased at the 2025 festival is Mass in B minor, proclaimed by critics as the perfect achievement in Bach’s religious oeuvre. Other, equally legendary festival highlights are Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, also known as Requiem Mass, and Felix Mendelssohn’s Overture for the Midsummer Night's Dream opera.

They are certainly not the only compositions worth the audience’s attention this year, but they all come with a great story. One could even argue that, written within a span of less than a hundred years, they are part of the same story.

IT TAKES ABOUT 10 HOURS by car to travel from Vienna to Dusseldorf and about 10 hours to get from Hamburg to Salzburg. These cities mark east and west and north and south of the world that gave us Bach, Mozart and Mendelssohn, just to start the list.

At the time Bach (1685-1750), Mozart (1756-1791) and Mendelssohn (1809-1847) lived and composed, the German-speaking lands did not belong to any nation; nationalism did not become a default ideology until later in the 19th century. Germany would not be united until 1871, and Austria would not show up on the map as such until 1918, after World War I ended.

Instead, independent states, technically parts of the Holy Roman Empire, dominated the region, such as the Kingdom of Prussia, where Mendelssohn was born (Hamburg) and raised (Berlin), or the Kingdom of Saxony, where – in Leipzig – Bach had his longest tenure and where Mendelssohn worked later in life and died. Mozart spent his life between Salzburg and Vienna, towns that belonged to the Habsburg Empire, which consisted of many ethnicities – Hungarians, Czechs and Poles, being more a family possession (the House of Habsburg) than a fixed nationality.

Many duchies and principalities meant many courts and regional capitals, each in need of a court composer or a church organist. And this is where the story of Mass in B minor begins – with Bach, yet again, trying to land a job.

BACH HAD BEEN COMPETING FOR AND QUITTING JOBS ALL HIS LIFE. Early in his career, he was jailed by the grand duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach for leaving his position for a more lucrative post at the court at Anhalt-Köthen. The Bachs were a family of professional musicians who considered music a way to support themselves and treated their career seriously. Another consideration that Bach had was, between two wives, 20 children to raise. He needed money.

Bach started working on Mass in B minor in 1733 during the War of Polish Succession, when European leaders competed for the throne of Catholic Poland. Saxonian August III won, promptly converting to Catholicism, and Bach, a Protestant, applied to become the king’s court composer with a mass based on both Protestant and Catholic orders, making it absolutely unique – and useless in practice. Mass in B minor was never conducted during Bach’s life; he finished it, already blind, a year or two before his death. It was first presented to an audience in 1859 after none other than Mendelssohn rediscovered Bach and made him a star.

Mass in B minor feels monumental, thanks to Bach’s artistry of the fugue, the most elaborate musical form of the Baroque, used at the time as a test of the composer’s skills. Based on polyphony (multiple voices) and imitation (repetition at different pitches), a fugue has one or more themes which recur frequently throughout the composition. It’s the fugue that gives Mass in B minor its depth and power, harmony and the sense of traveling between heaven and hell – majestic and mysterious, evoking a range of emotions. (During the Carmel Bach Festival, the audience can hear other fugue-based compositions from Bach’s The Art of Fugue.)

With the end of the Baroque era, the fugue became less dominant as a technique, but not for Mozart, and not for Mendelssohn. Both became obsessed with the form.

SALZBURG-BORN, VIENNA-BASED MOZART was deeply influenced by Bach; nowhere is his fascination with the fugue more visible than in the Requiem, which is also a mass, but a mass for the dead, a painful appeal to God to save the souls, written in the Catholic tradition. The composition shows Mozart’s dark streak, perhaps because Requiem was written on his death bed. Just like Bach before his death was rushing to finish the by-then-abandoned Mass in B minor, Mozart was rushing to complete his mass, ordered by an anonymous source who was willing to pay a thousand florins for the piece (around $20,000 in today’s money), 50 percent in advance. Even though Mozart was busy with other pieces, he agreed and worked on the composition to exhaustion.

In a delirium of stress, he supposedly came to the conclusion that he got poisoned and that he was writing the “mass for the dead” for himself. It is perhaps more sensible to think that Requiem killed Mozart as a source of stress, especially the killer double fugue (two fugues going on at the same time with two themes) he introduced to the piece.

While Bach was 65 when he died, with Mass in B minor completed, Mozart died at age 35 with an unfinished piece that had to be completed after his death so that his widow and six children would get the money. And Requiem got finished, even though we are not sure by whom.

The composer wrote a couple of first segments, but the following parts had only the vocal parts written, without orchestration, added later, most likely by 25-year-old Franz Xaver Süssmayr, who claimed Mozart instructed him in detail before he died. The most thrilling element of Requiem is Lacrimosa, which also had to be finished by someone else (one story says Requiem was finished by Joseph Leopold Eybler who definitely had the score in his hands). An official, full presentation of the piece took place a year after Mozart’s death, leaving speculations on what else this 35-year-old would have achieved.

WHILE BACH’S AND MOZART’S MASSES invoke the terror of mortality, Mendelssohn’s 13-minute-long Overture – what later would become A Midsummer Night’s Dream opera – is as bright, frivolous and unreal as they come, maybe because the composer was only 17 years old and reacting to his first read of the magic of Shakespeare’s play.

Like Mozart, Mendelssohn was a child prodigy, proclaimed by Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom as “the greatest music genius since Mozart.” Another connection to the Viennese composer was the fact that like him, Mendelssohn died early on, at the age of 38. That said, the music of Bach also influenced Mendelssohn deeply, and his own fugues reflect his admiration for Bach’s work. Mendelssohn played a key role in reviving Bach’s music, notably with his performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in 1829.

Born in Hamburg to a wealthy family, Mendelssohn worked in Berlin, Dusseldorf and Leipzig.

His best-known works include the Overture and incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which includes his Wedding March. Light, ethereal, but also bombastic, it is considered one of the first concert overtures, evoking the atmosphere of Shakespeare’s comedy through purely musical means – we can almost see dancing fairies in light and rapid string passages.

Mendelssohn first performed the overture in a version for two pianos, with his sister Fanny, and then orchestrated it for a public performance the following year in Stettin (then Prussia) in 1827.

Among other pieces by Mozart, the 2025 Carmel Bach Festival features works by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, some of whose compositions were published under her brother's name.

BACH, MOZART AND MENDELSSOHN are not the only German-speaking composers the audience will hear during the Bach Festival.

The festival is featuring works by Bach’s friend, Georg Philipp Telemann, as well as Sylvius Leopold Weiss, who met Bach through the composer’s eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. Another German composer in the lineup is Bernhard Joachim Hagen, perhaps the most important lutenist of 18th-century Germany. Hagen was influenced by another son of Bach, composer Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach.

The end of independent German statelets came with the Napoleonic wars. Following that, the German Confederation was established, and in 1871, Germany was unified into a single empire. Prussia's victory over Austria in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 excluded Austria from the new Germany.

The German-speaking world continued to produce composers and musicians, but went on to share this glory with Slavic countries, France, Italy and, eventually, the United States. ♫