Requiem (Mozart)

• 1. Introduction

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  Mozart's Requiem in D minor, K. 626, is arguably the most famous unfinished piece of music ever written. When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died on the 5th of December 1791, the manuscript on his desk was incomplete. A mysterious anonymous commissioner was waiting for it. A widow needed the final payment. And the question of who actually wrote which notes would fuel arguments for the next two centuries.

  The Requiem was commissioned secretly by Count Franz von Walsegg, an amateur musician known to pass off purchased compositions as his own. His young wife Anna had died on the 14th of February 1791, at the age of 20. He wanted a memorial mass he could claim to have written himself. What he got instead was one of the most tangled puzzles in all of classical music.

• 2. A Commission Wrapped in Deception

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  Count Walsegg sent an anonymous messenger to Mozart, concealing both his identity and his true intentions. Mozart received only half the payment upfront. When he died before finishing the work, his widow Constanze faced a dilemma of her own: she needed the remaining payment, but could not let the count know the Requiem was unfinished.

  Her solution was to find composers who could complete the work in secret, then pass it off as entirely Mozart's. The composer Joseph von Eybler was approached first. He worked carefully on the movements from the Kyrie through the Lacrymosa, adding his contributions directly to Mozart's manuscript. Then he stopped, felt unable to continue, and returned the score.

  The task fell next to Franz Xaver Sussmayr. He orchestrated the movements Eybler had sketched, completed the Lacrymosa, and composed entirely new movements: the Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei. For the final section, the Communio, he adapted Mozart's opening two movements almost note for note. The completed manuscript was delivered to Walsegg with a counterfeited signature and a date of 1792.

  Walsegg's plan to pass the Requiem off as his own was ruined by a public benefit concert organized for Constanze. That performance made the work's true authorship impossible to conceal.

• 3. What Mozart Actually Wrote

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  The autograph manuscript tells a precise and sobering story. Mozart fully completed only the first movement, the Introitus, with all orchestral and vocal parts in place. The Kyrie, the Sequence movements, and the Offertorium existed as detailed sketches: vocal parts and continuo were fully notated, and some prominent orchestral passages were indicated, but the accompaniment figures, inner harmonies, and orchestral doublings remained blank.

  The Lacrymosa is the most poignant boundary in the manuscript. Mozart's handwriting breaks off after the first eight bars. After that point, everything visible on the page was written by someone else.

  The Introitus itself opens with a seven-measure instrumental introduction in which the woodwinds, first bassoons and then basset horns, present the principal theme of the work in imitative counterpoint. That theme is modelled on Handel's opening chorus from his 1737 Funeral Anthem for Queen Caroline, HWV 264. Mozart had been commissioned by Baron Gottfried van Swieten in 1789 to rearrange Handel's Messiah, and Handel's influence runs throughout the Requiem. The Kyrie fugue, for instance, is based on the "And with His stripes we are healed" chorus from Messiah.

  Michael Haydn also left a mark. Mozart and his father had played viola and violin at the first three performances of Michael Haydn's Requiem in C minor in January 1772, and the theme of Mozart's "Quam olim Abrahae" fugue is a direct quote of the fugue theme from Haydn's Offertorium.

• 4. Constanze and the Myths

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  Constanze Mozart was the primary source for nearly every story that grew up around the Requiem's composition, and she told different versions to different interviewers. Three conflicting accounts, all dated within two decades of Mozart's death, all trace back to her.

  In 1798, Friedrich Rochlitz published a set of Mozart anecdotes he claimed to have gathered from Constanze in 1796. According to Rochlitz, Mozart received the commission well before Emperor Leopold II departed for his coronation in mid-July 1791. The problem is that Constanze was in Baden throughout all of June and into mid-July, so she could not have witnessed either the commissioner's arrival or a drive they allegedly took together to the Prater. The Magic Flute was already complete by mid-July, and the commission for La clemenza di Tito had arrived, leaving no room in Mozart's schedule for the large-scale Requiem work Rochlitz described.

  Also in 1798, Constanze gave an interview to Franz Xaver Niemetschek, whose biography appeared in 1808. That account includes a claim Constanze nowhere else repeated: that she removed the score from Mozart because she feared it was harming his health, and that she called a doctor. Niemetschek's account also claims that Constanze never learned the commissioner's name, which letters prove was false by the time the interview was published in 1800.

  The most widely accepted account is the one Constanze gave to her second husband, Georg Nikolaus von Nissen. After Nissen died in 1826, Constanze released the biography he had compiled, which appeared in 1828. That version is briefer and stops at Mozart's return from Prague, leaving the later period of composition unaddressed.

• 5. The Salieri Myth and Its Origins

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  Constanze's mythologizing created fertile ground for a specific and damaging legend: that Mozart's colleague Antonio Salieri had secretly commissioned the Requiem and was implicated in Mozart's death. The actual source of that story is an 1830 play by Alexander Pushkin titled Mozart and Salieri. Rimsky-Korsakov later turned Pushkin's play into an opera, and Peter Shaffer drew on that framework for his 1979 play Amadeus, which was subsequently made into a film.

  Constanze herself promoted the idea that Mozart believed he had been poisoned. According to Niemetschek's account, Mozart told his wife: "I am only too conscious... my end will not be long in coming: for sure, someone has poisoned me! I cannot rid my mind of this thought." She also spread the story that Mozart came to believe he was composing the Requiem for his own funeral, and that on the last day of his life he was explaining to his assistant how he intended to finish it.

  The commercial motive behind these stories is plain. Constanze needed the public to believe that Mozart wrote the entire piece himself, because a work entirely by Mozart would command larger sums from publishers and performers than one partly completed by lesser-known hands. Once that phase had passed and the truth was harder to suppress, the romantic circumstances she had built up took on a life of their own.

• 6. The Sussmayr Controversy

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  Sussmayr later claimed the Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei as entirely his own compositions. He also claimed that the final section, the Lux aeterna, was completed according to Mozart's own directions. The question of whether any Mozart sketches guided Sussmayr remains open. Constanze mentioned in a letter that Mozart left "a few scraps of paper with music on them" on his desk at his death, but whether those scraps existed, and whether Sussmayr used them, cannot be proved.

  Scholars have pointed to suggestive evidence in both directions. The Agnus Dei shares material with the Gloria of Mozart's earlier Mass in C major, K. 220, known as the Sparrow Mass, a resemblance first noted by the musicologist Richard Maunder. Simon P. Keefe has argued that Sussmayr likely referenced that earlier work when completing the movement. The choral bass at the opening of the Agnus Dei also quotes the main theme from the Introitus, which some read as a sign of deliberate design rather than improvisation.

  Sussmayr made one unambiguous error. He dated the clean copy of the manuscript "1792," clumsily, even though it was supposed to represent Mozart's own hand. Despite that and other weaknesses in his completion, the Sussmayr version became the standard performing edition and has remained so, even as audiences have encountered alternative completions that correct its perceived faults.

• 7. Modern Completions and a Stolen Page

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  Since the 1970s, composers and musicologists dissatisfied with Sussmayr's work have produced alternative completions. At least 19 conjectural completions exist in total, eleven of them dating from after 2005.

  A central question in several of these completions is the Amen fugue. In the 1960s, a sketch in Mozart's hand was discovered that some musicologists, including Levin and Maunder, believe belongs at the conclusion of the Sequence, after the Lacrymosa. The musicologist H. C. Robbins Landon argued against this, suggesting the sketch was intended for a separate unfinished mass in D minor. Those who favour its inclusion point out that its principal subject is the main theme of the Requiem in strict inversion, that it was found on the same manuscript page as a sketch for the Rex tremendae and for the overture of The Magic Flute, firmly placing it in late 1791, and that placing a fugue at the end of each large section creates a coherent overall design. Sussmayr did not include it.

  The autograph manuscript itself suffered a physical loss at the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels. Someone gained access to the manuscript during the fair and tore off the bottom right-hand corner of the second-to-last page, folio 99r/45r. The stolen fragment contained the words "Quam olim d: C:", Mozart's instruction that the Quam olim fugue was to be repeated da capo at the end of the Hostias. The perpetrator has never been identified, and the fragment has never been recovered. If the most widely held authorship theory is correct, those words were the last Mozart wrote before he died.