Missa brevis (Haydn)

Dack (2009) suggests that Haydn originally composed the work when he was still a teenaged chorister at St. Stephen's Cathedral, singing under the direction of Georg Reutter.

[1] When the young Haydn, newly unemployed after being dismissed from the choir at St. Stephen's, made a pilgrimage to Mariazell, the Missa brevis was one of the works he showed the music director there.

Redlich writes of "the Austrian type of the Missa Brevis, notorious for the hurried expediency with which large tracts of the text of the Mass are musically disposed of.

Redlich adds that, like similar instances of the missa brevis, Haydn repeats the music for the Kyrie in the final "Dona nobis pacem" section.

[3] The existence of various manuscript sources for the mass from the 18th century indicates that the Missa brevis spread by means of hand copying (the usual form of transmission of church music at the time),[citation needed] "leading its own independent life" (Jones).

St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, with the Kapellhaus (headquarters for the music director and his establishment) in the foreground. The Kapellhaus was Haydn's home when he served as a chorister at the cathedral and composed the Missa brevis. It was torn down in 1804, a year before the elderly Haydn re-encountered his early work.