Joseph Suder´s great festival mass complements the series of great sacred works from Bach to Bruckner in which tonal expressive means exhibit what are in polyphonic and in part homophonic traits. Suder´s work offers, in keeping with his stylistic will, a synthesis of strict contrapuntal thought with what would have to be termed a Romantic tone coloration, a combination of clear construction with eminent expressive power in the form of an intelligible musical language. Joseph Suder (1892 – 1980), active in Munich from 1911 on, did not bequeath a very extensive symphonic oeuvre to posterity. He composed his first major work of this type, the Chamber Symphony in A major, in 1925, and it was this work that brougth him his first international successes. In it he also formulated an important as well as interesting principle of design that would play a decisive role in almost all his later major works: the synthesis.
