With his Mass, Johannes Verhulst, the Dutch friend of Robert Schumann, wrote one of the most impressive compositions of nineteenth-century Holland. Did you know that Verhulst was one of the first to conduct Bach’s St Matthew in our country? Schumann and the six years younger Verhulst (1816-1891) were also active as conductors. Verhulst was the most important composer the Netherlands got in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the second half of the century, he also ruled as a conductor over the musical life of both Amsterdam and The Hague.

Verhulst was a great admirer of Handel and adapted his oratorios for his choral performances. Schumann was music director in Düsseldorf, where he had great difficulty with recalcitrant orchestra members. But with his choir members, assisted by his wife Clara at the piano, he got on well. He wrote ballads for them and arranged cantatas by his idol Bach. Schumann wrote praising words about Verhulst in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Here, the two find each other in the Mass Verhulst wrote as a young fellow, and the Dutch premiere of Schumann’s orchestration – including clarinet – of Bach’s Cantata 105.