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.

Joseph Suder was an excellent pianist. In his works the piano remained an expressive instrument and did not become (as has been the case in the works of many other twentieth century composers) a sort of a percussion instrument. In these piano pieces, works representing a cross section of his compositional output from 1911 to 1951, Suder is concerned with extending the expressive range oft he piano. Elements of very different character can be found here: dance and lyrical-serious song or humor and onomatopoeia. Although Suder proceeds from the precedents of the tradition like the dance types of the baroque, the Romantic scherzo, or the Song without Words, he transforms the tradition into something new by compressing form and expression in these short pieces and thus penetrating to what is essential.