The idea of writing a handbook on the Missa solemnis was suggested to me in 1988 by the general editor of this series. At the time, I was working at a project on the sketches and autograph score for the Agnus Dei; I welcomed the opportunity to take a step back from my research to look at the Mass as a whole. Reading the substantial literature on the work helped me to place it in its historical context, and to decide what new avenues of investigation might be most fruitfully explored.

As most writings on the Mass are concerned with explaining it as Beethoven's major contribution to religious music, the work has been perceived largely as a religious and personal statement by the composer. Two writers have been quick to observe that little has actually been said about how the work holds together, section by section, phrase by phrase. In 1936 Walter Riezler expressed his astonishment that the Mass had not been subjected to a full-scale analytical study. ‘Even Schenker has written nothing about it’ (Riezler 1938: 187), he remarked, just a year after Schenker's death and more than a generation before voice-leading analysis took root in the soil of musical academia.