On Mon, 30 Nov 1998, Bill East wrote:
> >Top music for the feast is of course Mozart's Coronation Mass, which was
> written not as I used to suppose for the coronation of an earthly potentate,
> but for the BVM's feast.
Actually the story used to be that Mozart wrote the Coronation Mass in C major,
K. 317, in 1779 to commemorate the anniversary of the crowning of a miraculous
image of the Virgin in the pilgrimage church at Maria Plain near Salzburg.
That commemoration took place annually in the month of June, however, not on
15 August. In any event, this traditional attribution of K. 317 is now
doubted, primarily because of the large orchestral and vocal forces called for
in Mozart's score; the church at Maria Plain is quite small, and unless an
open-air celebration of the mass was intended (unlikely), K. 317 could not
have been performed there without considerable difficulties. Mozart may have
scored two versions of the work, but no such second score is known to exist.
John Parsons
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