World Premiere: January 2, 1793
Last HSO Performance: April 13, 2014
Instrumentation: 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, organ, strings, chorus with soprano, alto, tenor and bass solos. Duration: 48 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. The Magic Flute was pressing, however, and he also received another commission at the same time, 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. 

Mozart worked on the Requiem as time allowed. From mid-August until mid-September, he was in Prague for the premiere of Tito, and when he returned to Vienna Schickaneder pressed him to put the final touches on The Magic Flute, which was first staged on September 30th. Mozart’s health had deteriorated alarmingly by October — he complained of swelling limbs, feverishness, pains in his joints and severe headaches. On November 17th, with the Requiem far from finished, he took to his bed. He managed to complete only the Requiem and Kyrie sections of the work, but sketched the voice parts and the bass and gave indications for scoring for the Dies irae through the Hostias. On December 4th, he scrawled a few measures of the Lacrymosa, and then 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.

Mozart’s wife, Constanze, was worried that she might lose the commission fee and asked her husband’s student Franz Xaver Süssmayr to finish the work following the detailed instructions Mozart had given him. Süssmayr filled in the orchestration, completed the last three movements by recycling music from earlier movements, and recopied the score so that the manuscript would show one rather than three hands. 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, who had 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 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.

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 continues to have a hold on the imagination of listeners matched by few other musical compositions. 

©2024 Dr. Richard E. Rodda