I recently listened to Mozart’s famous motet, “Exultate Jubilate” for the umpteenth time. It’s probably been a few years since I last heard it and it sounds as fresh and lovely as ever to my ears. Though perhaps not considered one of Mozart’s greatest masterpieces, this is a beautiful motet.

The Motet is called “Exultate Jubilate” because those are the first two words of the text. Those are Latin words meaning rejoice, shout.  Each movement begins with an orchestral introduction in the manner of an opera aria. In fact the musical style of this motet is much more operatic than ecclesiastical.

It is scored simply for strings, oboe, horns, and organ. Mozart composed this music during his stay in Milan in the winter of 72/73 and in fact composed it within two weeks of his 17th birthday. He composed it specifically for a castrato who had performed recently in one of his early operas, though nowadays it is sung by female sopranos as castrati are in rather short supply these days. Sorry for the dry humor.

Mozart divides the text into three separate movements, with a recitative preceding the second movement. Each movement can be thought of as a concerto with the solo instrument being a singer. In fact almost any eighteenth-century opera aria can be though of that way. It is full of brilliant effects, large leaps, trills, coloratura.

The first movement really lives up to the title. It is exuberantly joyful. This is very pretty music, and cannot fail to lift one’s spirits. After a brief recitative the second movement begins. In this movement the words are an entreaty to Mother Mary to give us peace and comfort. The somber, melancholy nature of the words was not lost on the young Mozart. This music is painfully beautiful, if such a juxtaposition of those two words makes any sense. The chromaticism and constant wavering between major and minor modes imbues this movement with a deep melancholy. In the movie Amadeus, Salieri says that the adagio from Mozart’s Grand Partita for 13 wind instruments has a quality of “unfulfillable longing.” That quality is exactly how I would describe this slow movement. And to think that such deeply emotional music came from a mere teenager” How miraculous!

The finale is nothing more than a display of operatic coloratura and is, at least for me, the least satisfactory of the three movements. There is only one word sung in this finale. The word alleluia is repeated over and over, going up and down scales and whatnot. It is the shortest of the three movements and concludes the motet as joyfully as it began.