Requiem in d, K. 626

The death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart continues to fascinate devotees of his music. It equally frustrates professionals and scholars who would like to rest their assessments on factual evidence. Speculation runs riot because the available “first hand” descriptions—offered by those present or near the event—were generally not written down until many years later. Moreover, gathering those memories together yields no consensus on the important data. Was he ill for a long time prior to the moment of death in the early morning of December 5, 1791? What was the cause of death? Who exactly was present? Was the weather dark and stormy or cold and clear? What kind of funeral was he given, a normal citizen’s burial or callous abandonment in a communal pit?
And for our purposes today, what about that mysterious Requiem mass upon which all agree he was working until the final days of his life? How complete was it before he died? Did he (or his wife) instruct a pupil to complete it? Did Mozart truly sense his own death that fall and work at the Requiem as an auto-memorial? Or was it merely one more commission that he needed, for financial reasons to complete and one that additionally sparked a renewed interest in sacred vocal music? Most of these questions cannot be answered with anything near certainty. They will remain the hobbyhorse of conspiracy theorists and armchair analysts. But with careful scholarship, some general points about the Requiem—clearly among the very last projects attended to by Mozart—can be asserted with conviction.

The origins of this Requiem were long the source of speculation, providing brilliant drama for films like Amadeus (which has Salieri menacingly involved, which was not the case). We now know that the man who commissioned Mozart to compose this Requiem was Count Franz von Walsegg. Walsegg sought the work to mark the February 14th anniversary of his wife’s death, and it is believed he intended to pass the music off as his own—hence his desire for anonymity in all relations with Mozart. With the generous commission as incentive, Mozart worked at the mass over the latter months of 1791. He was certainly ill at times that fall, though what precipitated the final rapid decline in late November is not clear. When he died on December 5, the Requiem materials were first passed to a minor composer, Joseph Eybler. Eybler spent perhaps a few weeks cleaning up the orchestration but returned the manuscript to Mozart’s widow Constanze.
In early 1792, just weeks before the expected first performance, Constanze hired Franz Süssmayr, Mozart’s gifted student and copyist, to complete any missing sections and deliver the work to Walsegg in fulfillment of the commission. Whether Mozart gave any specific instructions to his student—repeat this passage here, adjust the orchestration there—remains an open question. Nevertheless, it was vital to Mozart’s widow, Constanze, that the Requiem reach Walsegg ostensibly as a finished work by the master himself. Though the family may have been aware of Walsegg’s ultimate plans—the Count routinely passed off commissioned music as his own—Constanze needed the final payment to help settle her finances. Occupied with his own first opera, Süssmayr almost certainly did not complete the Requiem until the summer of 1792.

The vast majority of sections, from the Dies irae to the Hostias, were complete with vocal lines and bass progression notated, but with just mere hints about orchestration. Furthermore, of the beautiful Lacrimosa, Mozart himself only wrote the first eight measures, providing the thematic outlines and chord progression. The completion of this movement and the three concluding parts have fallen to various editors of Mozart’s score, the earliest being Süssmayr. Most modern performances use the Süssmayr edition, though conductors routinely make adjustments to ameliorate the most egregious errors likely caused by sheer haste. It should be noted that Süssmayr was well aware of his failure completing Mozart’s score, writing to the work’s publisher in 1800 to grudgingly admit his role, “I am firmly convinced that my work is unworthy of that great man.” Despite this admission and glaring issues over a century of performances, no systematic new edition was prepared until very recently. In the 1970s German musicologist Franz Beyer undertook to revise Süssmayr’s work, sort out fact from fiction in the extant manuscripts, and produce a performance edition more in line with Mozart’s style. Today’s performance follows the Beyer edition.

Making overall judgments about Mozart’s Requiem must be qualified by the unfinished state in which it left his hands when he died. Only one section of all twelve can be said to preserve a definitive record of Mozart’s intentions in terms of material and orchestration: the opening Requiem and Kyrie. The Requiem opens with powerful grandeur before opening out to moments of more tender lyricism, whereas the Kyrie offers a tour de force in counterpoint. Yet we can look at the bulk of the melodic and harmonic material, even in its bare form, and judge the brilliance of the work overall. For although Mozart did not personally notate anything of the final three movements, Beyer and others feel the musical sophistication on display there far outshines anything else Süssmayr achieved in his own works. Thus it is believed that the Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei are genuine Mozart.
We close our thoughts on the Requiem with words by Franz Beyer himself, who has taken such pains over many, many years to produce a more faithful reflection of Mozart’s vision and actual accomplishment:

Anyone who makes an effort to pursue the history of this unique fragment is soon faced with a gnarl of truth and fables nearly impossible to untangle, a knot of seemingly arbitrary and clearly factual circumstances, of human failings from mistakes to deceit. Only with a mixture of thankfulness and astonishment can we react to the fact that in light of all these uncertainties, the work nevertheless managed to become an integral part of Western musical culture.


We can debate the extent and value of others’ contributions to the Requiem. But even in that troubled score, genuine Mozart sounds forth at every turn. Had other projects not intervened, he would surely have had time to finish the Requiem in his own hand before death silenced this soul so completely overflowing with lyricism and drama.

(c) Jason Stell