Run Time: Approx. 50 minutes

“As an artist Mozart lived in beauty, and he ended in beauty.” – Jan Swafford

It’s a delicious story: an ailing and near-destitute composer is commissioned for a requiem mass by a mysterious nameless patron. He begins to work obsessively, thinking only of the money. As his health deteriorates, he begins to suspect he’s been poisoned. He sleeps too little and drinks too much. Soon, he’s on his deathbed, working furiously, but he’s unable to complete the Requiem. The great composer dies nestled in the scattered, still-wet pages of his unfinished Mass for the Dead. Afterward, he’s tossed into an unmarked pauper’s grave, unmourned and uncelebrated. Not even Shakespeare could write it better than that.

The trouble is, most of this is invented, or at least strongly contested. Here’s the truth, as far as we know it today:

Mozart indeed spent many years in financial discomfort, but towards the end of his life, he was doing alright. His final opera, The Magic Flute, was enjoying a good run in Prague, and he was on the cusp of an appointment to a plum Kapellmeister position. He would have a salary and musicians at his disposal after a lifetime as a freelancer. Things were looking up.

The commission for the Requiem did indeed come from an anonymous source, but today we know the patron to be Count Franz von Walsegg, who sought the work for the death of his young wife. His anonymity was most likely an attempt to pass the work off as his own among his friends.

Mozart’s wife, Constanze, asserted that he never learned the name of the mystery patron, but that seems unlikely since Mozart and the Count had many friends in common. Constanze was in fact the originator of many falsifications around Mozart’s life, including the claim over his supposed poisoning. This wasn’t malicious on her part, but practical. As a young widow with two children, her life now depended on the continued value of his music. All press is good press when you need money.

Though Mozart was, at this time, often working to the point of exhaustion, he was in reasonably good health when he began the Requiem. He worked on it for a short period before pausing to write the Little Masonic Cantata, but returned quickly. Letters to Constanze, who was convalescing from a brief illness, show considerable excitement and good spirits, but sometime after returning to the Requiem, he indeed fell ill. He likely thought nothing of it at first—he had been plagued by poor health all his life—but soon it became clear that this was more serious. Doctors were summoned, and, as we now know, that may have been the worst thing that could have happened. They bled him profusely and subjected him to all manner of toxic tinctures. His death was slow, and likely very painful, but—and this is where the stories get it right—he kept working to the very end.

What did he manage to complete?

Written entirely by Mozart:

I. Introitus

Complete vocal parts and sketches of orchestration written by Mozart:

II. Tuba mirum
III. Sequence (except No. 6)
IV. Offertory

Only the first eight measures completed by Mozart:

III. Sequence – No. 6, Lacrimosa

Written entirely by Süssmayr:

V. Sanctus
VI. Benedictus
VII. Agnus Dei
VIII. Communion. Lux aeterna

Who finished the Requiem?

As the reality of his illness became more clear, Mozart summoned his student, Franz Xaver Süssmayr, and began instructing him on how to finish the piece. Mozart’s sister-in-law, Sophie, recalled arriving at his bedside to find pages of the Requiem scattered across the sheets, along with dozens of little notes on how it should be completed. Though his exact last words are disputed, Sophie also reported the final sound he uttered was an attempt to sing part of the Requiem’s timpani line.

Final Days

At some point—we can’t know when—Mozart would have realized that he wasn’t going to get up again. That the Requiem, at first an intriguing commission, had now become an elegy for himself. According to one story, that moment may have come during work on the “Lacrimosa,” of which he managed only eight bars. Just one day before he died, he apparently gathered together Constanze, Süssmayr, and a few singers from the Magic Flute, which was still playing across the street, to sing through the Requiem. When they reached the Lacrimosa, he burst into tears, saying that he could not go on. Those eight bars are likely the final notes he penned.

I want very badly for this story to be true. The opening measures of the “Lacrimosa” stand out in the Requiem as a moment of outsized grief. Musicologist Jan Swafford deems it “a little world in itself: two bars of a mournful fragility, two bars as if quietly sobbing, then a rise to a peak of sorrow.” It seems irresistibly fitting for that to be his final phrase.

Mozart’s passing did not go unnoticed, as many would claim. While the location of his exact grave is unknown, Mozart was given a decent-sized funeral. His death was announced in the papers, and memorials were held in Prague, Vienna, Kassel, and Berlin. When the news of his death reached Haydn, the composer was reportedly so shaken that he began to question his own faith, later recalling that, “for some time I was quite beside myself over his death, and could not believe that Providence should so quickly have called away an irreplaceable man into the next world.”

Music and Legacy

With a backdrop fit for the theater, it’s tempting to attach extra significance to the Requiem, but I believe Mozart would have written exactly the same piece whether he was dying or not. He was a perfectionist, fastidious in his work, and a consummate student of music. At the time of the Requiem, he had become engrossed in the works of Bach and Handel, absorbing the complex Baroque techniques like fugue, which can be heard to full effect in the “Kyrie.”

He also had a flair for drama. In places, particularly in the “Dies irae,” we can hear echoes of Don Giovanni being dragged to hell. In the “Tuba mirum” and “Recordare,” the featherlight quartet writing recalls moments from Così fan tutte and The Marriage of Figaro. He was an opera composer at heart, and knew exactly how to render a scene. As Swafford said, “This is a musical world that seems not just to evoke mourning but to emerge out of the shadow of death itself.”

Despite Süssmayr’s best efforts, there is a discernible shift as the piece becomes more his own writing than Mozart’s. When the “Offertory” begins, Mozart’s voice is still strong, but as it progresses, he fades. By the “Sanctus,” he’s just a shadow; only his influence remains. Thirty years earlier, Leopold Mozart had asserted his little child prodigy was a miracle of God. Today, Mozart is indeed something of a deity. Perhaps what the Requiem truly captures is his transfiguration.

— Notes by Valerie Sly, 2026