The Choir of the Witten/Herdecke University performs Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, a piece that stands with Bach’s Mass in B Minor as the most significant mass setting in classical music. Beethoven himself called it his greatest achievement.

At the time of its completion (1823), there was nothing else like it. As musicologist Donald Tovey said, “Not even Bach or Handel can show a greater sense of space and of sonority. There is no earlier choral writing that comes so near to recovering some of the lost secrets of the style of Palestrina. There is no choral and no orchestral writing, earlier or later, that shows a more thrilling sense of the individual colour of every chord, every position, and every doubled third or discord.”

The files are available as 96kbps MP3s.

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