The facts of the commissioning and completion of Mozart’s Requiem—at least insofar as they can be known—are fairly clear: sometime in the summer of 1791, Mozart interrupted his work on Die Zauberflöte to compose La clemenza di Tito, the opera commissioned for the coronation of Emperor Leopold II in Prague in September. And about this time, he also received an anonymous commission for a Requiem mass, a commission that, according to an early reminiscence of Constanze Mozart, he was keen to pursue; some years later she told Mozart’s biographer Franz Xaver Niemetschek that at the time he had enthusiastically “expressed a wish to try his hand at this type of composition, the more so as the higher forms of church music had always appealed to his genius.” But he did not take up the Requiem right away. Pressed for time, it is likely that he did not write down any of it until October, after the premieres of his two operas (La clemenza di Tito on September 6 and Die Zauberflöte on September 30). 

The commission for the Requiem came from Franz Count von Walsegg, who lived at Schloss Stuppach, about fifty miles southwest of Vienna. Walsegg’s wife, Countess Anna, had died prematurely on February 14, 1791, at the age of thirty, and it was Walsegg’s intention to honor her memory both in art and in music: in addition to the Mozart commission, Walsegg also contracted for a marble and granite monument from the sculptor Johann Martin Fischer.

Whether Mozart knew Walsegg’s identity or not, he died before completing the work, and at his death, only the Introit had been composed more or less in full; from the Kyrie to the Confutatis, and for the Domine Jesu, only the vocal parts and basso continuo were written in full. At the Lacrimosa, Mozart wrote only the first eight bars of the vocal parts along with the first two bars for the violins and viola. Constanze Mozart was in a quandary: she needed the money Mozart had been promised for the Requiem, and so she turned to his pupils and friends to complete the work. First, she turned to Mozart’s pupil Franz Jacob Freystädtler, who added string and wind parts to the Kyrie fugue. Then she engaged the composer Joseph Eybler, who promised to complete the work by the following Lent but in the end decided the task was beyond him. And finally, she turned to Mozart’s amanuensis Franz Xaver Süssmayr, who finished the score in early 1792.

The publication of the Requiem in 1799 by the Leipzig publishers Breitkopf & Härtel was not without controversy, especially in light of the stories then circulating concerning Mozart’s last days and whether or not he had, in fact, completed the mass. And this gave rise, in the 1820s, to a debate concerning the work’s authenticity—or at least the authenticity of parts of it. After all, the reports were contradictory: Süssmayr claimed to have discussed the work with Mozart but newly composed in their entirety the Sanctus, Benedictus, Agnus Dei, and the completion of the Lacrimosa; Constanze, on the other hand, claimed that Süssmayr had access to sketches by Mozart and that the repetition of the Kyrie fugue as the last movement was the composer’s idea.

A different kind of debate arose during the 1950s, shortly after the publication of a new critical edition that clearly distinguished between those parts of the work written by Mozart and those written by Süssmayr. Unlike the earlier debate, however, it was not Mozart’s authorship that was called into question; rather, it was Süssmayr’s completion of the score and whether he had, in fact, been up to the task. To be sure, complaints about Süssmayr’s work on the Requiem were not new. Not only had the movements composed by him been omitted in various nineteenth- and twentieth-century performances, but as early as 1800, a reviewer of the first edition noted that “...the instrumental accompaniment, which, at times, is very incorrect, proves that the work as a whole cannot have come from Mozart’s pen precisely as it stands... It is, incidentally, very possible that a large part of the instrumental accompaniment may be the work of Süssmayr...”. For scholars of the 1950s and later, this was an invitation to revisit the work, to study in detail Süssmayr’s completion, and to suggest ways in which it might be improved. These new versions of the Requiem included completions by Franz Beyer, Duncan Druce, Richard Maunder, H. C. Robbins Landon, Robert Levin, and Simon Andrews, and they run the gamut from cosmetic corrections of Süssmayr’s perceived faults to a wholesale dismissal of the movements and orchestration composed by him.

It may well be asked to what extent analysis—objective by some standards, subjective by others—can in fact give clues to Mozart’s authorship of movements or parts of movements, motifs, instrumental details, or the substance of the solo and choral parts. Or the extent to which precedents may or may not suggest ways Mozart might have finished the work differently had he lived to complete it. But what is really at stake here? In the end, the debate is not entirely a technical one but also a biographical and aesthetic one. In this sense, it is a throwback to earlier debates concerning the Requiem, debates about the work’s “meaning”—and in particular its Mozartean meaning, considering the circumstances of its composition and non-completion. This lies behind Weber’s criticism of the 1820s, Herzog’s account of 1839, and the justifications given for changing—whether wholesale or cosmetically—the score as it has come down to us in Süssmayr’s version. No matter what completion we perform or listen to, it is Mozart’s meaning that we are looking for.

© Cliff Eisen (edited)