ABSTRACT
As the nineteenth century proceeded, large-scale or symphonic concert masses were composed alongside simpler ones. Some composers continued to find employment in churches, but opportunities within the church were both limited and limiting, so other composers created masses for personal religious reasons or to demonstrate compositional expertise. Composers such as Schubert and Brahms began to adjust and even replace the traditional liturgical texts to accord with personal beliefs. Bruckner’s dramatic settings take masses to new theatrical heights, despite being intended for church performance, and masses began to be composed expressly for the concert hall. Delius transports the mass into new, fully secular territory when he sets the atheistic texts from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra in A Mass of Life (1904).
