Mozart’s final testimony
For many music-lovers, the year 1791 induces an outpouring of tearful empathy for the tragedy of 5 December, when Wolfgang Amadeus died at the age of 35. Shortly before his death, Mozart told his wife Constanze that he was writing his own Requiem. His unfinished Mass for the Dead proves his premonition, and the whole of his last year is defined by the melancholic halo of a composer engaged in a drawnout acceptance of his own demise.
It’s a seductive way of thinking about Mozart’s last year, but virtually none of the above is true. Neither are the fabulous fictions by everyone from Pushkin to Peter Shaffer in their plays and films: Salieri didn’t poison Mozart. Mozart did say that he felt he was writing his own Requiem, but that was when disease was ravaging him. Yet before the final two weeks of his life, 1791 is full of visions of new creative possibility – above all, ironically, in the music of the Requiem.
There’s a gigantic range in his 1791 catalogue, from the first piece he finished in the year, the visionary B flat major Piano Concerto, K595, to the two operas he completed: the knockabout comedy and masonic manifesto of
The Magic Flute and the high-minded generosity of La Clemenza di Tito.
But the music Mozart most wanted to write was large-scale sacred works. He had assiduously made himself next-in-line as Kapellmeister of St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna – the frail incumbent, Leopold Hofmann, died in 1793. And why? Because Mozart
The real sadness of 1791 is how full of new musical life Mozart’s Requiem is
wanted to measure himself against his compositional heroes: JS Bach and, especially, GF Handel, whose music he had known and loved since his time in London as a child in the 1760s, and which he arranged and modernised for Viennese audiences in the 1780s.
The Requiem is full of re-writings and transcendences of Handel’s music, from the older composer’s Dettingen Anthem to his Funeral Anthem for Queen Caroline, and the piece as a whole is written with a new combination of expressive directness and contrapuntal complexity. Despite the genuine weirdness of the Requiem’s commission – a mysterious stranger asked for the piece so that his employer, Count von Walsegg, could pass the Requiem off as his own work – it’s music whose compactness of scale would have made it a useful part of the liturgy. Mozart isn’t writing a work of self-indulgent grief, but a piece of public resonance and utility. That’s the real sadness of 1791: not the Requiem’s morbidity and mythology, but how full of new musical life it is.
So the Requiem’s unfinishedness needn’t be a tragic biographical deathknell. In the questions it makes us ask of our own lives – always finished and unfinished, complete and incomplete – the Requiem represents a creative and existential restlessness, an endlessly living question mark in musical history. The Requiem lives on…