Classical Music | Orchestral Music

Recorded on 07/08/1980, uploaded on 05/30/2011

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Perhaps no other piece of music in history is surrounded by as many myths and mysteries as Mozart's final composition—the Requiem in D minor. Much of this has risen from the efforts of Mozart's wife, Constanze, to give the appearance that Mozart had completed the work in its entirety before his death.

The Requiem was commissioned by Count Franz von Walsegg, an amateur musician who wished to have a requiem mass in which to commemorate the anniversary of the death of his wife. However, the count's intentions were not entirely honest. Once receiving the work from Mozart, it was his plan to pass the work off as his own composition. Mozart received a partial payment upon accepting the count's commission with the promise of another payment on delivery of the completed work. It is somewhat unclear exactly when the commission occurred and how quickly Mozart set to work on the Requiem. Nevertheless, it is known that by the time he began working on it, he was in poor health. During its composition, he confessed to his wife that he had been poisoned and was composing the Requiem for his own funeral.

At the time of his death on December 5, 1791, only the opening Requiem aeternam was completed in full with orchestration and vocal parts. The following Kyrie and most of the Sequence up to the Confutatis existed only as vocal parts with a basso continuo outlining the harmonies. Only eight measures of the Lacrimosa were written and partial work had also been done on the two movements of the Offertorium. It is unclear what information Mozart left as to the other movements he had not yet composed. According to one account, he had left small "scraps of paper" with notes to his intentions for the remainder of the work.

Knowing that Count Walsegg would not pay for an incomplete work and, furthermore, that an authentic Mozart work would fetch a far greater sum from publishers and concerts than one only partially written by him, Constanze wisely kept the work secret after her husband's death. She first gave the incomplete Requiem to Joseph von Eybler, a student of Albrechtsberger, who had praised him as the greatest musical genius in Vienna next to Mozart. Eybler worked on the Sequence (the Dies irae through the Lacrimosa) but eventually felt unable to complete the work and returned it to Constanze. She then delivered the score to Franz Xaver Süssmayr, who had worked with Mozart as copyist on La clemenza di Tito and Die Zauberflöte. That Süssmayr was a student of Mozart is likely a fabrication perpetrated by Constanze to justify the authenticity of Süssmayr's work. Süssmayr took Eybler's work as his starting point. He completed the orchestration of what Mozart had left and then further added the final movements that a Mass would have possessed, namely, a Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei. Finally, he added the Lux aeterna by adapting Mozart's first two movements to the new words. According to both Süssmayr and Constanze, this was done in accordance with Mozart's intentions, though that alone is hardly reason to accept it as true. Süssmayr returned the work to Constanze within 100 days of Mozart's death and she delivered the completed work to Count Walsegg, with her husband's forged signature, and received the final payment.

Today, Süssmayr's completion is the most commonly performed version of the work. However, there are other versions of the Requiem. An alternate version of the work appeared as early as 1819 by Sigismund Neukomm, a student of Joseph Haydn. Johannes Brahms edited a critical edition of the Requiem and attempted to separate Mozart's original intentions from Süssmayr's revisions. As recently as the 1970s, other alternate versions of the Requiem have appeared, mainly because of the discovery of an Amen fugue that appears to be strongly connected with the Requiem. It is believed the fugue would have occurred at the end of the Sequence. These later versions have often been undertaken with the aim of giving the work a more "Mozartean" sound in terms of orchestration and voice leading, a point that Süssmayr did not effectively achieve.