Written by Anna Vorhes

BORN: January 27, 1756, Salzburg, Austria

DIED: December 5, 1791, Vienna, Austria

INSTRUMENTATION: two Basset horns (a lower relative of the clarinet, invented in 1760), two bassoons, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, strings, mixed chorus with soprano, alto, tenor, and bass soloists

COMPOSED: 1791 but left incomplete by Mozart’s death. His student Süssmayr completed the work using his knowledge of Mozart’s plans and his own study of his teacher’s style. Other completions have been attempted by other scholars as well. 

WORLD PREMIERE: The Introit and Kyrie were probably premiered at a memorial service for Mozart held at the Hofpfarrkirche of St. Michael in Vienna on December 10, 1791. The first complete performance (in a completion by Mozart’s student Franz Süssmayr) was given January 2, 1793, in the Jahn-Saal in Vienna, in a concert organized by Mozart’s supporter and friend Baron van Swieten.

DURATION: 60 minutes

SOMETHING INTERESTING TO LISTEN FOR: The Requiem Mass of the Roman Catholic tradition was familiar to Mozart. The Introitus which begins the mass moves from a minor key to a major key as the text moves from a plea for eternal rest to an entreaty that perpetual light make that rest bearable. Mozart treats the Kyrie, which follows with polyphony, as an unusual and relatively rare tool for a classical era composer. The limited text of the Kyrie makes polyphony a reasonable compositional choice. This is followed by a set of sequences, which are somewhat like protestant hymns in that the text is neither the formal liturgy nor Biblical in origin. Unlike protestant hymns, these are not several sets of words to a single melody. Each distinct set of words is given a separate composition. The Tuba mirum opens with a famous trombone solo, followed by the bass singing the same melody. The soloists each enter in turn from the lowest to the highest. While the concept of word painting (using musical sounds to create the text of the work) was not common in Mozart’s time, he uses it here to create powerful images. Confutatis allows us to hear the eternal flames of damnation, and Lacrimosa sounds like the cries of someone weeping, especially in the opening strings. Mozart may have only completed the first eight bars of this movement, but the execution by Süssmayr of the ideas Mozart provided makes for a powerful experience.

PROGRAM NOTES:

More rumors and mystery surround Mozart’s Requiem than any other single work in the standard literature of music. They range from the artistic license of the movie Amadeus which presents the Requiem as part of a plot by rival composer Salieri to engineer Mozart’s death to the incredible rumors that Mozart’s Masonic brothers secretly commissioned the Requiem and also poisoned the composer as a sacrifice so that they could use his skull for Masonic rites. Neither of the preceding statements is based in fact.

The actual commissioner of the Requiem did indeed extend the commission in secret, using messengers rather than meeting the composer himself. He was Count Walsegg Stuppach, an amateur composer who lost his beloved wife to illness in February of 1791. In July of that year he sent a messenger to Mozart commissioning the Requiem, perhaps planning to pass the work off as his own or alternately in a response to the request by one of Mozart’s Masonic brothers using the commission as a way to provide the composer with additional funds. The fact that Mozart was unable to finish the composition prior to his own death made the possible plans to present it as the commissioner’s own work a moot point.

Mozart worked diligently on the Requiem through his last months. He also completed other works, including The Magic Flute. The popular perception of his life includes poverty and domestic upheaval. The poverty was relative; while he wasn’t the most successful of Vienna’s composers he was not reduced to living in a slum without food or unable to move in society. Constanza’s ill health, exacerbated by numerous pregnancies and infant deaths in their short marriage, was a drain on family finances. Mozart sent her to spas to regain her health and enlisted physicians to care for her. Constanza gave birth to a final son in July 1791, the same month that Walsegg commissioned the Requiem. The health problems meant that finances were complicated, since neither Mozart nor his wife were careful money managers. The domestic upheaval was not that of a demanding wife with few skills. It was the upheaval that comes with chronic ill health of a family member.

By fall 1791 the Mozart family finances were improving, and the composer was hopeful about the future. His own health was deteriorating but the cause of the downturn in health is not clear. The obvious and acute phase of the downturn lasted just a bit over two weeks before the composer’s death. Mozart’s death certificate lists “hitziges frieselfieber” (which roughly translates as heated prickly heat fever) as the cause of death, but since that time we have tried to figure out exactly what caused the early death of this genius. The actual diagnosis was more a description of symptoms than a cause of death. Perhaps what actually caused his death was military fever, a type of what we would call today influenza. Trichinosis, the disease caused by parasites in undercooked pork, has been advanced as a possible match to the described symptoms. Mozart himself seems to have occasionally felt he was being poisoned, but there is no real evidence to support this. Plausible theories include a recurrence of the rheumatic fever he suffered twice as a child or kidney failure due to some other cause. We will never know, as his grave was of the common type in his day, poorly marked (or possibly unmarked) and vacated after a number of years. While to us this seems unthinkable it was a far more common practice in that time.

Whatever the cause of Mozart’s death, the creation of the Requiem felt to Mozart as though he was writing the work for his own demise. The mass for the dead was an important part of worship for Mozart, a practicing Catholic. Constanza tried to discourage Mozart’s labor over the composition, but Mozart persisted. His student Süssmayr worked alongside his mentor, listening to Mozart’s thoughts and plans about the work. As a successful composer, Mozart had favorite copyists to complete orchestrations and to copy parts.

After Mozart’s death Constanza needed to find financial support for herself and their children. She asked several people to help finish the Requiem in secret. Süssmayr was the one finally chosen and his version has become the standard. Some of the movements were complete and ready to be orchestrated, others were only sketches. The finished work does make a coherent whole and has become beloved by audiences.

There are many apocryphal accounts of the days before Mozart’s death and the actual death scene. Many of them can be traced to twenty-five and more years after the actual event. The Lacrymosa is the center of one of these myths. In a poignant description we hear that Mozart gathered a number of friends to sing through the partially completed movement the day before he died, breaking down in tears a few lines into the impromptu performance. The descriptions by witnesses of the composer’s physical state at the time, plagued by edema and partially paralyzed, makes this lovely and emotional picture an impossibility. In reality that story can be traced to the 1850s during a time when romantic views of previous centuries were popular. Beethoven was becoming a mythical titan, and those who loved the music of Mozart wanted the same regard for their beloved composer. Current historians are less likely to find embroidering earlier times with imagination acceptable, preferring instead to look for as many ways of understanding the reality of the past as are available to them.

Whatever the complex history of the work, Mozart’s Requiem still speaks to audiences beautifully and strongly. The experience of the work is far more important than understanding the exact circumstances of its creation. All of the speculation pales in the shadow of an experience shared by audiences over more than two centuries.