Mozart Requiem – March 15, 2025

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

In December 1790, Joseph Haydn left Austria for London with the violinist and entrepreneur Johann Peter Salomon. He spent his last day in Vienna with Mozart. When they parted, Mozart embraced his friend and said, “Papa, I fear that this will be our last farewell.” Haydn, no longer young at 59, took Mozart’s remark to be concern for his welfare on such a long journey to a distant country. As it happened, Mozart’s words were prophetic of his own death. Haydn outlived his younger contemporary by 18 years and produced superb music in his old age. When he died in 1809, the work performed at his funeral was the Mozart Requiem.

Mozart rarely composed without a specific commission, and the Requiem was no exception. During summer 1791, he was hard at work with Emanuel Schikaneder on The Magic Flute. The new opera went into rehearsal in July. About the same time, a mysterious stranger presented himself to Mozart at his residence, with an unusual assignment: a Requiem mass, to be composed and delivered as soon as possible. The stranger declined to identify himself or the originator of the commission and cautioned Mozart not to attempt to learn anything further about his employer.

We know these facts from written reports by Mozart’s contemporaries, including his widow, Constanze, and her second husband, Georg Nikolaus Nissen, who was one of Mozart’s first biographers. Only after Mozart’s death did the full story emerge. Count Walsegg-Stuppach, an Austrian nobleman and music lover, fancied himself a composer. Lacking real talent, he often commissioned works by well-known composers for private performance, recopying the works to pass them off as his own.

In February 1791, the Count’s wife died. Stricken, Walsegg resolved to secure a Requiem to be performed annually on the anniversary of her death. He sent the messenger to Mozart with the request, instructing his representative to maintain secrecy.

Needing money, Mozart accepted the project and set to work, then put the Requiem aside when Emperor Leopold II was to be crowned King of Bohemia. For that occasion, Mozart was asked to compose an opera seria. Composing with lightning speed, he completed most of La clemenza di Tito in an astonishing 18 days, before travelling to Prague to supervise rehearsals and the premiere. His frenetic pace included ongoing work preparing for The Magic Flute’s opening. One starts to understand the extreme degree of nervous exhaustion that compromised his health.

After Mozart returned from a trip to Prague in September 1791, the unidentified emissary called on him repeatedly to check on its progress. Unable to determine the origin of the eerie commission and drained from overwork, Mozart became convinced that a messenger from the netherworld had been sent: that he was composing his own Requiem.

At this point, Mozart’s health deteriorated. Battling dizziness, headaches, swelling and nausea, he continued to work on the Requiem. With the assistance of a composition student, Franz Xaver Süssmayr (1766–1803), he sketched several movements, orchestrating the first few measures of some, concentrating on the vocal lines, providing only limited instrumental detail in others. At Mozart’s death on December 5, the Requiem lay incomplete.

Constanze Mozart was unable to collect the fee owed to her late husband until the missing parts were completed. She approached several Viennese composers, eventually settling for Süssmayr, who had worked closely with Mozart during his last months.

One of Süssmayr’s cleverest ploys to conceal the participation of a second composer was to conclude the work with the repetition of the music heard at the beginning. Mozart had used this same type of self-quotation in earlier masses, so the tactic was stylistically consistent—and very convincing. So successful was Süssmayr’s reconstruction and completion that the Requiem has become one of the most frequently performed choral works in the classical repertoire. Also because of Süssmayr, the Requiem is a thorny topic in Mozart scholarship, with musicologists and performers debating how much of the music is Mozart’s and how much his gifted student’s. The Requiem’s inherent beauty and remarkable contrapuntal skill assure its following, regardless of questions about authenticity.