Requiem in D minor, K.626

Joannes Chrisostomus Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart—who began calling himself Wolfgango Amadeo about 1770 and Wolfgang Amadè about 1777 (he used “Amadeus” only in jest)—was born in Salzburg, Austria, on January 27, 1756, and died in Vienna on December 5, 1791. He worked on the Requiem during the last five months of his life but left it unfinished; the version typically heard (as is the case in these concerts) was completed by his pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr, to fulfill the commission specified below. The first complete performance was given on December 14, 1793, in the new monastery church at Wiener Neustadt, though it was billed as a work by Franz, Count Walsegg-Stuppach, who had commissioned the piece anonymously with the intention of passing it off as his own, to be used on the occasion of a solemn Mass in memory of his wife. However, well before that, the first movement (in two sections, “Requiem aeternam” and “Kyrie eleison”) was sung at a Requiem Mass for Mozart on December 10, 1791, five days after his death, in Saint Michael’s Church in Vienna; and Mozart’s old friend, the Baron Gottfried van Swieten, performed a Requiem—presumably Mozart’s—on January 2, 1793, in a Vienna concert given to support the composer’s widow and two surviving children.

The score of Mozart’s Requiem calls for soprano, alto, tenor, and bass soloists, chorus, and an orchestra of dark timbres. Omitting flutes, oboes, and the higher clarinets, Mozart calls for 2 basset horns, 2 bassoons, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones (found in none of his symphonies or concertos), timpani, continuo organ, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).

The myths and mysteries that swirl around Mozart’s Requiem began virtually the day he died and were given new life in recent decades by the play and movie Amadeus. But there’s little real mystery around the piece or about Mozart’s death. The actual story of his final masterpiece, however, is still unlikely, given the mysterious circumstance of its commission, and its position as one of the greatest and most beloved of sacred works, despite being finished by other and lesser hands.

Did Mozart know he was near the end when he began the Requiem? Probably not, though he knew he was ill and exhausted. His pace in his last months would be incredible for a man in the peak of health: he wrote two operas, Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) and La clemenza di Tito, finished the Clarinet Concerto, and wrote the Kleine Freimaurer-Kantate (Little Masonic Cantata) and most of the Requiem.

As for his death, the likely cause is sadly pedestrian. The rumors of Mozart’s being poisoned began immediately, but in fact he probably died of rheumatic fever, which he had had before and which was going around Vienna at the time. Though years later his wife Constanze claimed that near the end he told her he thought he had been poisoned, what she actually believed was close to the truth: at not quite 36, her husband worked himself to death. That tragedy of December 5, 1791, is not compounded, as the old stories have it, by his poverty and neglect, but rather the opposite: he died when he was at the peak of his creativity and on the threshold of serious prosperity.

The story of the Requiem’s commission is the one element that approaches the bizarre, though again there’s no mystery about it. It had to do with the musical and eccentric Count Franz von Walsegg. His wife had died the year before and he wanted to commission a Requiem in her memory. So far, simple enough. But the count had a little game he liked to play: he would commission pieces secretly, have them played for friends, and, with a smug smile, ask who they thought wrote them. The friends were expected to guess him as the composer, and they usually played along, though no one was fooled. 

Did Mozart know who the commission came from? We have no evidence one way or the other. But he really didn’t care who was going to pay him. He wasn’t planning to die, and he was enthusiastic about writing a Requiem, for two reasons. First, though he had produced stacks of sacred music, most of it Masses, during his youthful Salzburg years, he had never written a Requiem, and it would be a useful item in his portfolio. (The Count had exclusive use of the piece for a given time, but then Mozart would be free to use and claim it.) But there was another matter in the offing.

The Kapellmeister of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna was apparently on his last legs, and Mozart had succeeded in being named his assistant and eventual successor. This was as prestigious and well-paying a musical job as existed in Europe’s capital of music. Besides its handsome salary of 2000 florins a year, Mozart also had in hand 800 fl. as court chamber composer and had been promised a yearly stipend of over 2000 more from two benefactors, to which would be added a potentially lavish income from publishing and performing.

So Mozart expected shortly to be quite comfortable and busy writing sacred music as cathedral Kapellmeister, and he was giving a lot of thought to how he would approach it. From various clues in and out of the music, it is clear he was looking for a new sacred voice, avoiding the usual operatic-style sacred music that marked, for one example, Haydn’s Masses and oratorios. Mozart wanted something simple, direct, communicative, spiritual. The Requiem was his first and last major essay in that new style. It had a predecessor, though: the little Ave verum corpus that he wrote in June 1791. That piece is an incomparable example of art hiding under artlessness, a gentle and tuneful outing that somehow works powerfully on the heartstrings. From that point flowed the Requiem.

Of course, Mozart didn’t finish it. He completed and scored the opening movement and, of the rest, drafted about 2/3 of the final piece. Much of that was skeletal, but still essentially there: it was his habit to write out the vocal parts, bass, and maybe the leading string part of a movement, then go back and fill it in. So it was with much of the Requiem. His last effort seems to have been the Lacrimosa, which breaks off after eight bars.

Constanze Mozart said her husband picked his student Franz Xaver Süssmayr to finish the piece if he couldn’t, and with him went over sketches and ideas for the completion. If so, why did Constanze first ask another student of her husband’s to finish it, and hand it to Süssmayr only when that one gave up on it? Süssmayr claimed that the Osanna and last three movements were his, but in fact they’re based on earlier material in the piece. And it’s worth mentioning that Mozart was not all that impressed with Süssmayr, teased him relentlessly, called him “Snai,” “Sauermeier” (“sour farmer”), “Sauerbier” (“sour beer”), etc.

Exactly how all this played out remains a bit vague, because it was incumbent on Constanze, once she recovered from her devastation at Wolfgang’s death, to obscure the fact that the piece was finished by somebody else, since otherwise the commission would have been in danger. For his part Süssmayr worked directly on Mozart’s incomplete score; it helped that his hand was nearly indistinguishable from his teacher’s, and he could also do a good forgery of Mozart’s signature. (All of this was figured out years later.) Yet it can only be said that this composer otherwise doomed to obscurity, mostly known in his day for stage comedies, did a more than adequate job of completion. It isn’t all Mozart, there are mistakes in scoring and part-writing that are certainly not Mozart’s, but as a whole the Requiem still glows with the enchanted voice Mozart arrived at in his late music.

Its uniqueness is heard from the first page of the Introitus (Requiem eternam): the distinctive sound of strings plus two basset horns (a sort of tenor clarinet that Mozart loved) and bassoons. Later trumpets and timpani turn up, and throughout there are elaborate parts for trombones, though they are usually involved in doubling the chorus.

After a quiet introduction the chorus enters forte with a darkly intense, unforgettable opening. On the whole the Classical period that Mozart exemplified was not at its best in tragic music, or for that matter in sacred music. In the opening Mozart finds a tragic sacred voice of a power that had rarely been heard since the Baroque. Appropriately enough, a leading influence on the piece is Handel; Mozart was acquainted with several of his oratorios and did an updated arrangement of Messiah that is still often heard. Again, the keynote of the whole is simplicity and directness. The orchestra part is restrained, often simply doubling the chorus. What follows the first movement is a work of enormous strength and variety, steeped in the history of religious music but still strikingly fresh, and with moments of the kind of magical voice Mozart found in Die Zauberflöte.

The second movement Kyrie is a robust fugue, which like much of the Requiem is greatly energetic, contrasting with the limpid beauty of other sections. There is too much in the piece to examine in detail, but mention can be made of a few of the memorable and characteristic moments. The Dies irae is a ferocious evocation of judgment day, but the Tuba mirum that follows is magisterial, its trombone solo representing the Last Trumpet. The Recordare, Jesu pie (“Remember, merciful Jesus”) begins with gentle wafting lines in the strings. Finally there is the stunning Confutatis maledictis (“When the damned are confounded”) that begins in the men’s voices with appropriate ferocity but is then contrasted, almost negated, by the heartrending sotto voce setting for the women of “Voca me cum benedictus” (“Call me with the blessed”).

Mozart’s Requiem, then, is not a mystery but a marvel. That a man in the process of working himself to death could write music of such sure-handed power and imagination is barely conceivable. That is shown equally by the notes on the manuscript, which at the door of death still have the absolute sureness and clarity of all Mozart’s scores. And like all of his scores there are few strikeouts, virtually nothing but certainty.

Jan Swafford

Jan Swafford is a prizewinning composer and writer whose most recent book, published in December 2020, is Mozart: The Reign of Love. His other acclaimed books include Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph, Johannes Brahms: A Biography, The Vintage Guide to Classical Music, and Language of the Spirit: An Introduction to Classical Music. He is an alumnus of the Tanglewood Music Center, where he studied composition. 

The first American performance of Mozart’s Requiem took place on February 22, 1835, at the City Hotel in New York with the Italian Singers and soloists Clementina Fanti, Julia Wheatley, Sig. Ravaglia, and Sig. Porto. The first Boston performance was given by the Handel and Haydn Society, Carl Zerrahn conducting, on January 18, 1857, with soloists Mme. D’Angri, Mrs. Long, Sig. Morelli, and Mr. Arthurson.

The first Boston Symphony Orchestra performances of Mozart’s Requiem—in special non-subscription concerts to help raise funds for the erection of a Mozart monument in Vienna—were given on April 10 and 11, 1888; Wilhelm Gericke conducted, with soloists Lilli Lehmann, Louise Meisslinger, Paul Kalish, and Emil Fischer and a “Grand Chorus of 300." Serge Koussevitzky led the first BSO subscription performances in December 1931 and the first Tanglewood performance in August 1941. Erich Leinsdorf led a January 1964 performance in memory of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, at Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross.