Josef Rheinberger (1839–1901) was a German Romantic composer. Born in Liechtenstein, he spent much of his life in Munich working as a court conductor and as a teacher at the city’s music conservatory, where his more notable students included Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, Engelbert Humperdinck, Richard Strauss and Wilhelm Furtwängler. As a composer, he left behind a diverse oeuvre and is best remembered for his organ and church music, as well as for his operas, symphonies, numerous chamber works and choral pieces. His sacred works bear witness to a composer who resisted the strict, conservative and puritanical aesthetic of German Cecilian church music in order to pursue his own path. In 1878, he composed his Mass in E-flat major, his third in the genre, for double choir and no instrumental accompaniment. He dedicated the work to Pope Leo XIII, who showed his gratitude by bestowing a papal decoration on the composer the following year. The mass is given a remarkably intimate atmosphere by the fact that its opening and closing movements are relatively quiet compared to the more rapid movements that make up the middle of the work.