Sacred music that longs to celebrate and touch life: Mozart was barely 17 when he composed in Milan the motet ›Exsultate, jubilate‹ for the castrato Venanzio Rauzzini’s ›angelic throat‹. Excited about his part in ›Lucio Silla‹, the singer requested it from Mozart himself. The result is less a devote praise of God than a celebration of pure joy in youth, beauty, music and singing. Joseph Martin Kraus, born in the same year as Mozart in Miltenberg am Main, created his motet ›Stella coeli‹ as a real compositional flash of genius in 1783 for the dedication of a new organ at the Benedictine monastery Amorbach. And the organ ›sings‹ as well in a radiant central role in the early mass of the instrumentation master Joseph Haydn, next to the cornet and English horn, which usually had no place in sacred music of this time.