Missa In Tempore Belli, In Tempore Belli

On Saturday, April 25, 2026, the Cornell University Glee Club and Cornell Chorus presented this year’s Major Works Concert. The concert’s headliner, Joseph Hadyn’s Missa In Tempore Belli, or Mass In Time of War, was fortuitously chosen– or was it? Was the strongest force that drove America into this year’s conflict in the Middle East situated not in Foggy Bottom, Arlington, or even, uh, elsewhere, but in the Cornell University Music Department, seeking thematic autonomy through a policy of titular hedging to underlie one of this year’s strongest performances? Absolutely not– fact checkers all agree that the Engineering Quad is absolutely not on the verge of building a nuclear weapon. But all I’m saying is, the war broke out on February 28, and the Cornell choirs started rehearsing the Mass weeks in advance. Let the facts speak for themselves…

The concert started out with the Chorus alone performing Indonesian composer Ken Steven’s Cikala Le Pong Pong, a piece with lyrics originating from the Pakpaknese culture, in northern Sumatra, Indonesia. Beginning with a soloist gliding over and weaving through a luminous sus chord, the piece sharply dives into a driving rhythm. According to a translation of the lyrics into English, the original text is a parental injunction to their daughters telling them to be more ladylike, a profound warning sorely… uh, nevermind, my editor’s not going to like that.

Next was Mary Montgomery Koppel’s A La Lune. This piece, a setting of a William Carlos Williams poem of the same name, plaintively calls out to the moon for it to “Pardon us our troubled quietnesses” and “All halting tendernesses”. This call is not the ready and anticipatory “Now Come, Fire!” of triumphant Teutonic daybreak; instead, the call is an apologetic near-supplication coming from one whom in the midst of “little journeys endlessly repeated” can never seize the day, but is, like the moon, condemned to “nooning by night.” Here, the moon is not a comforting guardian dispensing wisdom; instead, it is a fellow-traveler, who, due to shared experience “must have understanding of these things” which so overshadow the speaker.

But enough about the text. On to considering the piece itself, and, what a piece! The work’s musical features evoke powerful images: high-register chords like moonlight condensed into a fluid, suspensions never quite perfectly resolved, a lingering on a major seventh that when resolving, finally, into an octave, displays not solidity and confidence but a tenuous calm. (Hear that? It was not X, but Y. ChatGPT can kick rocks.) Dying down as if obscured by clouds, the piece wanes after a climactic high point on repetitions of “pardon us.” Shortly after, and broken apart from the former by a pause, the choir returned with a piercing melody that anywhere else could not communicate anything but some great overcoming, a massive and victorious heave. but which over the chords supplied, almost perversely, was significant of nothing other than a heart-wrenching tragedy. Some rough beast slouches towards the tonic after what felt like twenty centuries. The piece then moves into a section uncannily triumphant, the choir’s voices slipping like a dislocated arm into pure major chords, finally settling on one heroic pinnacle, astonishingly loud, beautiful, and… empty, as if nothing had been learned through the whole experience. One gets the impression that all this ardent and turbulent keening has been directed at nothing more than a silent ball of rock, staring back blankly, and signifying, as it were, nothing. And one gains an inkling of what Williams must have been thinking and feeling when he announced as an aesthetic statement that our whole country, coast to coast, was going to “ kill every man, woman and child in the area west of the Carpathian Mountains” (in Minecraft, it can no doubt be presumed), out of a strange frenzy, associated in some unknowable way with love. Shortly after, the piece dies down for real, settling into a quietly despairing minor chord, then minor third, then unison, then silence.

One is reminded of another work, with melodies just as arcane and just as given to their leaping between voice parts. Looking up at the selfsame moon on the other side of the Atlantic, in Germany, Arnold Schoenberg’s early Romantic string sextet, Transfigured Night, based on a poem by Richard Dehmel of the same name, mirrors this piece (or perhaps A La Lune is the reflection).

Schoenberg’s piece has its moments of what seems like barely ordered chaos, but a transition to lush harmony successfully communicates the change from two people walking in a “bare, cold wood” to one “high” and “bright” halfway through. But where Dehmel’s moon (eventually) overlooks a shimmering universe where a splendorous glow makes the “cold sea” beautiful and the presence of a loving other provides a refuge, Williams’ speaker seems alone with the moon. This is so even though Williams’ speaker uses the plural “us.” But what collective under examination is more conducive to an infinite loneliness than all humanity considered as a whole, the “mass” predominating over the “man”? No one who has ever made their way through a large crowd in a packed city can think otherwise. Likewise, while Schoenberg can’t resist (at least not until his atonal period) returning to a comforting ending and a soft landing, Koppel ends the piece with the listener feeling drained and almost exhausted from the psychological journey undertaken.

Koppel’s work can restore the faith of any artistic reactionary that a piece produced in our era can still be emotionally resonant and meaningful beyond formal experimentation without being, on the other hand, less adventurous than a Sousa march. It was difficult not to view the rest of the concert as in the penumbra of this shocking, crystal-pristine, disturbing, and altogether stellar, or more appropriately, lunar— but not lunatic— work.

The next and last piece performed by the Chorus alone was Kim Andre Arnesen’s Even When He Is Silent. Theodor Adorno is famous for saying that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” But what about during Auschwitz?

This piece sets a text scrawled on a wall by a Jew hiding in Nazi Germany:

 “I believe in the sun even when it’s not shining / I believe in love even when I feel it not / I believe in God, even when He is silent.”

Arnesen’s piece, unlike that of Koppel, does not revel in difficulty. Instead, it’s very harmonically conventional, almost saccharine.

When Arnold Schoenberg wanted to address the Holocaust in A Survivor from Warsaw, he took the opposite approach. For him, harsh spoken voice-singing over a harsher orchestra was more fitting. But Adorno was critical of his approach, because A Survivor from Warsaw still tries to encapsulate the tragedy of the Holocaust in an art piece: the suffering of the victims re-processed and then “thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them.” For Adorno, “Even the sound of despair pays its tribute to a hideous affirmation.” Human tragedy becomes a way to foreground hope, which accepts that tragedy in a way, even when to accept it so readily is monstrous.  Would Arnesen avoid Adorno’s ire?

Frankly, I don’t think it would, but that’s not so bad. There’s no way the chordal resolutions, which, it is true, are rote, but comforting too, can be taken as anything other than a sign of hope. And since the text was taken from the events of the Holocaust themselves rather than an artistic re-processing of said events, what is being depicted is real hope, that actually was, not a hope feigned or a hope falsified. If there is any time when twenty-first century man can approach the saccharine-sweet honestly and purely, it is precisely at the point when it is counterposed against the greatest of real tragedies.

The choir’s performance was without pause between the two works, effectively merging them together. Arnesen’s work thus provided an opposition between a simpler black-and-white opposition which was itself opposed to the complexity of the previous work.

The Glee Club started their section of the concert next, with Janáček Vyhruzka and Ron Jeffers’ Waiting for the Dawn of Peace. Each of these pieces was well executed, with a more militaristic and less liquid feel than what had come before. The Glubbers managed, as always, to impress. Yet Another Fine Example…

The Glee Club finished their section of the concert by performing Sibelius’ classic Finlandia, set to, as is commonly done, the lyrics that have been used as a hymn in many a church, starting, “This Is My Song.” In both stanzas, the first two lines start off as a normal patriotic hymn, all about skies bluer than the ocean, sunlight on clover and all that.  The twist, of course, is that “my home, the country where my heart is” is not unique beyond being one’s own, for “other lands have sunlight too, and clover / And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.” One can’t help but feel that, despite the best of intentions underlying, perhaps, this song of peace, its words communicate a misunderstanding about the meaning of national identification and patriotism. Surely one cannot reduce love of country to an irrational attachment to an arbitrary and interchangeable plot of dirt? What’s wrong here, exactly?

The truth is that not every land has clover. Or, more straightforwardly, though different nations share their nation-ness, just as different people share the same humanity while being differentiated by various conditions, different nations, as it were, share the same dignity while being made really distinct and not interchangeable by their particulars, forming a single, united harmony that would be incomplete without any one.

But set to the beautiful Finlandia, the hymn’s imperfectly accurate words seemed truer than they really are, and a listener couldn’t help but sympathize with the sentiment behind them. As for the artistry of the performance itself, it was impeccable.

Now we come to the actual “major work” of the major work concert, concerning which I actually have quite little to say. The conductor, Dr. Lerangis, told the audience that this was not going to be a particularly sad and somber mass despite the title. But I was a little surprised at just how joyful the mass was. Yes, that’s a charming sequence, and the voices flutter about nicely, but isn’t this mass supposed to be in, well, a time of war? And, hold on, what is actually being sung is “Lord, Have Mercy” over and over! Is this really the most appropriate way to set that text? Far be it for me to question the greats, but the piece just seemed a little tiny bit too cheerful given its title. A few ominous timpani beats in the Benedictus and Agnus Dei just aren’t going to cut it.

Sure, all this rejoicing probably has some relevance to Haydn’s particular situation at the beginning of the 19th century, with Napoleon and all that, but I’m going to ignore actual history right now and focus on what this piece can mean to us now. We ourselves are just as the piece is– while our country is at war elsewhere in the world, we go about our daily lives as if nothing has happened (unless we’re at the pump). The fact that we can have the luxury to listen to Missa In Tempore Belli in a massive concert hall instead of hiding in a bomb shelter is a testament to the sheer power America has, and the relative comfort it affords its population even in time of war. Does that mean we all have to go about in sackcloth and ashes? Maybe not (or at least not for that reason), but as the year of the semiquincentennial passes its zenith, we can at least be more reflective about the immense privileges that being American affords us.

As for the concert? All that remains to be said is that this really was a “Mass in Time of War.” *title credits roll*