Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

• Born: January 27, 1756, Salzburg
• Died: December 5, 1791, Vienna
  
  
  

Requiem in D Minor, K. 626

• Composed: 1791
• Instrumentation: SATB soloists, SATB chorus, 2 clarinets (basset horns), 2 bassoons, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, organ, strings
• May Festival notable performances: First: May 1882, Theodore Thomas conducting, Theodore Thomas Orchestra (soloists: Amalia Friedrich-Materna, soprano; Annie Louise Cary, contralto; William Candidus, tenor; Myron Whitney, bass), Arthur Mees, chorus conductor. Most Recent: May 2013, James Conlon conducting (soloists: Janai Brugger, soprano; Daniela Mack, mezzo-soprano; Richard Croft, tenor; Jordan Bisch, bass), Robert Porco, director of choruses. Most Recent CSO: January 2019, David Robertson conducting (soloists: Nicole Cabell, soprano; Kelley O’Connor, mezzo-soprano; Nicholas Phan, tenor; Eric Greene, baritone), Robert Porco, director of choruses.
• Duration: approx. 55 minutes

In early July 1791, while he was busy composing The Magic Flute, Mozart received a letter testifying to the glories of his music and alerting him that he would be having a visitor with a proposal on the following day. The letter was unsigned. The visitor, “an unknown, grey stranger,” according to Mozart, appeared on schedule and said that he represented the writer of the letter, who wanted to commission a new piece—a Requiem Mass—but added the curious provision that Mozart not try to discover the patron’s identity. Despite the somewhat foreboding mystery surrounding this venture, Mozart was in serious financial straits just then and the money offered was generous, so he accepted the commission and promised to begin as soon as possible. The Magic Flute, however, was pressing, and he also received at the same time another commission, one too important to ignore, for an opera to celebrate the September coronation in Prague of Emperor Leopold as King of Bohemia—La Clemenza di Tito, based on one of Metastasio’s old librettos—that demanded immediate attention. As if those duties were not enough to fill his thoughts, Mozart’s wife, Constanze, was due to deliver another baby at the end of the month. She had been in the local spa town of Baden since the beginning of June, trying to preserve what little health she had left after nine years of almost constant pregnancy since her marriage to Wolfgang in 1782, and Mozart went to bring her back to the city and to her doctors in mid-July. Just as he was entering the carriage for the trip, the “unknown, grey stranger” approached him; the stranger inquired about the progress of the Requiem, was told that it was going well, and left, apparently satisfied. On July 25, Constanze gave birth to Franz Xaver Wolfgang, who became a composer and music teacher.

Mozart worked on the Requiem as time allowed. From mid-August until mid-September, he, Constanze and his pupil Franz Süssmayr, who composed the recitatives for Tito, were in Prague for the opera’s premiere. When they returned to Vienna, Emanuel Schikaneder (librettist for The Magic Flute) pressed Mozart to put the final touches on The Magic Flute, which was first staged on September 30. Mozart’s health had deteriorated alarmingly by October—he complained of swelling limbs, feverishness, pains in his joints and severe headaches. On November 17, with the Requiem far from finished, he took to his bed and was treated by Dr. Thomas Closset, one of Vienna’s best physicians, with the prescribed remedy for what was diagnosed as “miliary fever” (perhaps rheumatic fever or uraemia, though the evidence is inconclusive)—cold compresses and unremitting bleeding. Mozart became obsessed with the Requiem, referring to it as his “swan-song,” convinced that he was writing the music for his own funeral: “I cannot remove from my mind the image of the stranger. I see him continually. He begs me, exhorts me, and then commands me to work. I continue, because composition fatigues me less than rest. Moreover, I have nothing more to fear. I know from what I feel that the hour is striking; I am on the point of death; I have finished before I could enjoy my talent.... I thus must finish my funeral song, which I must not leave incomplete.”

Mozart managed to finish only the “Requiem” and “Kyrie” sections of the work, but he sketched the voice parts and the bass and gave indications for scoring for the “Dies irae” through the “Hostias.” On December 4, he scrawled a few measures of the “Lacrymosa,” and then asked three friends who had come to be with him to sing what he had just written. He tried to carry the alto part but broke into tears as soon as they had begun and collapsed. A priest was called to administer extreme unction; at midnight Mozart bid his family farewell and turned toward the wall; at five minutes to one on the morning of December 5, 1791, he died, six weeks shy of his 36th birthday. He never knew for whom he had written the Requiem.

Constanze, worried that she might lose the commission fee, asked Joseph Eybler, a student of Haydn and a friend of her late husband, to complete the score. He filled in the instrumentation that Mozart had indicated for the middle movements of the piece, but he became stuck where the music broke off in the Lacrymosa. Franz Süssmayr, to whom Mozart had given detailed instructions about finishing the work, took up the task, revising Eybler’s orchestration and supplying music for the last three movements. Süssmayr recopied the score so that the manuscript would show one rather than three hands, and it was collected by the stranger, who paid the remaining commission fee.

The person who commissioned Mozart’s Requiem was Count Franz von Walsegg, a nobleman of musical aspirations who had the odious habit of anonymously ordering music from established composers and then passing it off as his own. This Requiem was to commemorate Walsegg’s wife, Anna, who died on February 14, 1791. The “grey stranger” was Walsegg’s valet, Anton Leitgeb, the son of the mayor of Vienna. Even after Mozart’s death, Walsegg went ahead with a performance of the Requiem, which was given at the Neukloster in the suburb of Wiener-Neustadt on December 14, 1793; the title page bore the legend, Requiem composto del Conte Walsegg. A few years later, when Constanze was trying to have her late husband’s works published, she implored Walsegg to disclose the Requiem’s true author. He did, and the score was first issued in 1802 by Breitkopf und Härtel.

Buried away in Otto Erich Deutsch’s Mozart: A Documentary Biography, is a fascinating but little-known tidbit of information that may (or may not) have been a factor in Walsegg’s commission. One of Mozart’s brothers in Freemasonry was Michael Puchberg, who earned many fond footnotes in the composer’s biography for his generous financial support to the composer (Mozart euphemistically called these emoluments “loans”) during Wolfgang’s last years. Puchberg lived and managed a textile firm at Hoher Markt 522. That address, it seems, just happened to be located in the Viennese house of Franz von Walsegg, and it is certainly not impossible that Puchberg encouraged Walsegg, in his curious way, to help Mozart in his time of distress.

It is difficult, and perhaps not even advisable, to dissociate Mozart’s Requiem from the circumstances of its composition—the work bears the ineradicable stamp of otherworldliness. In its sublimities and its sulfur, it appealed mightily to the Romantic sensibility of the 19th century, and it continues to have a hold on listeners matched by few other musical compositions. (Perhaps it is significant that the Requiem is performed annually in Vienna for the Feast of All Saints, the day after Halloween.) Manifold beauties of varied and moving expression abound throughout the Requiem: the ethereal strains of the “Recordare”; the vehemence of the “Confutatis”; the bitter plangency of the “Lacrymosa”; the old-fashioned, Bachian profundity of the fugal “Kyrie”; the feigned joy, so quickly terminated, of the “Hosanna.” The words of Lili Kraus, the Hungarian pianist closely associated throughout her career with the music of Mozart, apply with special cogency to the wondrous Requiem: “There is no feeling—human or cosmic, no depth, no height the human spirit can reach—that is not contained in his music.”

—Dr. Richard E. Rodda