The imperial Mausoleum attached to the former court chapel at Graz, which has since been elevated to the status of a cathedral.

Graz was the capital of Inner Austria, which was governed by a cadet branch of the Habsburg family.  When the famously incompetent Emperor Matthias died in 1619, he was succeeded by his cousin, Archduke Ferdinand of Styria, who moved his personal retinue to Vienna upon his election as the next Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II.

Louis XIV. consecrates his crown & sceptre to the Mother of God by Philippe de Champaigne (1643), courtesy of the Hamburger Kunsthalle.

Sunday October 11, 2026 at 4 P. M.

St. Mark Church
2200 San Joaquin Hills Road
Newport Beach CA 92660

Sacred music during the Age of Absolutism played an indispensable rôle in helping a ruler convey an image of piety, prestige, and power.  While the Holy Roman Empire was busy combatting heresy with resplendent polychoral music in a highly Italianate style, the French court––beginning with Louis XIII. and continuing with even greater splendor during the reign of Louis XIV.––promoted highly idiosyncratic liturgical music that had less to do with Romanitas and more to do with reinforcing the idea that France, as “Eldest Daughter of the Church”, was unique among Christian nations and therefore deserving of a distinctly Gallican musical style.

The liturgical sensibilities of seventeenth-century France were notoriously lax, with a preference for grands motets performed during low masses & paraliturgies like Benediction, as opposed to settings of the mass ordinary intended for high mass, which were preferred by the Austrian court.  Eventually (and sometimes controversially), these opulent sacred compositions made their way into secular spaces, in particular with the first public concert series in history, Le Concert Spirituel, which consisted of sacred music produced during the season of Lent, when secular forms of musical entertainment like opera were forbidden.

Musica Transalpina pays homage to the opulent sacred music of the French court which formed the basis of this first public concert series, featuring large-scale compositions by Campra, Delalande, and other composers which could have been heard during low mass at the chapel royal in Versailles, or at a concert in the Salle des Cent Suisses in the Tuileries.

Posthumous portrait of Emperor Matthias painted by Hans von Aachen in 1625, housed in the rijksmuseum of Amsterdam.

Sunday November 15, 2026 at 4 P.M.

Orange County

Venue will be announced soon.

Musica Transalpina is proud to present the first known modern performance of an extraordinary Requiem mass composed by Christoph Straus in October of 1621. Straus was chapel master to the notoriously incompetent Emperor Matthias, who showed a preference for the baroque musical styles emerging in Italy, and Christoph Straus was among the first to compose music for the Habsburg court in the elaborate new concertato style.  When Emperor Matthias died in 1619, Straus was replaced by the much more fashionable Italian composers that the new emperor, Ferdinand II., brought with him from his home in Graz, whose court far outshone Vienna in splendor.  Straus was retained in a bureaucratic capacity in the Imperial household, so it is most likely––considering the month that this Requiem setting was composed––that it was intended for the All Souls’ Day observances held at the chapel royal on November 2, 1621.   

This Requiem mass is extraordinary for specifying distinctions between vocal & instrumental passages within each of the parts, which is remarkable considering the early date of its composition.  It is composed in ten independent parts divided across two choirs, with voices alternating with instruments in order to create primitive obbligato passages, effectively doubling the scope of this work to twenty parts.  Christoph Straus became chapel master at S. Stephen’s Cathedral in 1626, and died in 1631, the year that this setting was published by Christoph’s son, Matthias Straus.