## The Image Today and the Background of the Legend ![Eduard Friedrich Leybold, Portrait of Mozart](https://pub-70ea1917bee3420dafb13a15f6e2778d.r2.dev/articles/eduard-friedrich-leybold-mozart.webp) *Eduard Friedrich Leybold, "Portrait of Mozart" (Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)* Mozart's *Requiem in D minor*, K. 626, has long been received together with a set of dramatic stories on top of the bare fact that it was left unfinished. A genius haunted by a premonition of his own death; an anonymous commission delivered by a mysterious messenger dressed in grey; a funeral piece written for himself, composed while wasting away; the pen falling silent in the middle of the final movement, the *Lacrimosa*, only hours before he died — that kind of narrative. Peter Shaffer's play *Amadeus* (1979) and Miloš Forman's film adaptation (1984) are one example of how such dramatizations have continued to reinforce this reception. In music history, scholars have explored from several angles the question of when and how the mystical, romantic image we hold of the work was actually formed. This article surveys some of that scholarship, trying to disentangle what was happening in Mozart's own time from the layers later generations added. --- ## The Documented History of the Requiem The surviving records give a concrete picture of how the work came into being. In the summer of 1791, Count Franz von Walsegg (1763–1827) commissioned a Requiem from Mozart, through an anonymous intermediary, in memory of his wife Anna, who had died on 14 February of that year at the age of twenty (Keefe 2012). Walsegg was a music-loving nobleman who lived at Schloss Stuppach in Lower Austria. He had a habit of passing off other composers' works as his own, which is why the commission was anonymous. The messenger was either Walsegg's lawyer, Johann Sortschan, or his estate manager, Franz Anton Leitgeb. Mozart took up the Requiem in earnest only after finishing his opera *La clemenza di Tito* (premiered in Prague on 6 September) and *Die Zauberflöte* (premiered on 30 September) (Keefe 2012). But he fell ill around 20 November and died on 5 December. What he left in score consisted of the Introitus fully orchestrated, the vocal parts and basso continuo with some instrumentation for the Kyrie through to the *Lacrimosa* (up to bar 8), and parts of the Offertorium. There is no autograph for the Sanctus, Benedictus, Agnus Dei, or Communio (Keefe 2012). His widow Constanze, partly because of the unpaid balance of the commission, moved quickly to have the work completed by Mozart's pupils. She first turned to Joseph von Eybler (26), who wrote directly on top of Mozart's autograph and added mainly string parts to the first five movements of the Sequentia (*Dies irae*, *Tuba mirum*, *Rex tremendae*, *Recordare*, *Confutatis*), before giving up and returning the score to Constanze (Kemme 2009). The work was then taken up by Franz Xaver Süssmayr (25), one of Mozart's pupils. Süssmayr chose not to continue working on the score with Eybler's hand on it, but instead to copy out a fresh score from scratch. This was tied to Constanze's interest: a score in several different hands could not be passed off as a finished autograph by Mozart, and the rest of the commission fee was at stake. Süssmayr therefore needed to produce a clean copy in something approaching Mozart's own hand. He kept some of Eybler's additions but rewrote most of them, composed the remainder of the *Lacrimosa* and the Sanctus, Benedictus, Agnus Dei, and Communio, and delivered the completed score to Walsegg by the spring of 1792 (Kemme 2009, Keefe 2012). The version performed most widely today is this Süssmayr completion. In 1960, the musicologist Wolfgang Plath found a sketch in the Berlin State Library that shows Mozart had also planned an "Amen fugue" to follow the *Lacrimosa*. From the nineteenth century on, the completion has been rewritten many times — Richard Maunder published a new edition in 1988, for example. --- ## What a Requiem Is, in the First Place A Requiem is a Catholic Mass for the Dead. The name comes from the opening line of the introit, "Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine" (Grant them eternal rest, O Lord). It is a piece of religious music tied to a specific liturgical function — a funeral, an anniversary Mass — rather than a concert work. The movement structure of Mozart's Requiem is as follows: - Introitus: *Requiem aeternam* - Kyrie - Sequentia: *Dies irae* → *Tuba mirum* → *Rex tremendae* → *Recordare* → *Confutatis* → *Lacrimosa* - Offertorium: *Domine Jesu Christe*, *Hostias* - Sanctus, Benedictus, Agnus Dei, Communio The text of the *Lacrimosa* opens "lacrimosa dies illa / qua resurget ex favilla / judicandus homo reus" — "tearful that day, when from the ashes shall arise the guilty to be judged." It is a lament from the morning of the Last Judgement, when the dead rise to be judged. The point at which Mozart's autograph breaks off is the eighth bar of this very movement. Before Mozart, composers such as Ockeghem, Palestrina, and Biber had written Requiems, all of them treated as part of the church-music tradition. After Mozart, well-known examples include Verdi (1874), Fauré (1888), and Britten (1962). According to Simon P. Keefe (2012), Mozart's Requiem itself was written as liturgical sacred music; there is no evidence that Mozart himself imagined it for the concert hall. --- ## How the Image Was Shaped — Three Scholarly Perspectives A piece originally written as liturgical sacred music has come to be received as "a dying genius's deeply personal expression of his own soul." How did that happen? Here are three recent perspectives from musicology. ### Cool Contemporary Reception and Nineteenth-Century Secularization (Cliff Eisen) Cliff Eisen has argued that the interpretation of the Requiem as "consolation by a dying genius" is bound up with cultural shifts in the nineteenth century and after (Eisen 2006). Eisen lines up cases in which major nineteenth- and twentieth-century musicologists described the Requiem as "consoling" and as "the pious personal expression of a dying genius." Reception in Mozart's own time, and through the early nineteenth century, looked quite different. A Mozart commentary published in 1803 called the work "gloomy" in its seriousness and "dark" in its melancholy; another reviewer wrote that he had looked in vain for the "pious humility of expression" appropriate to a Mass of intercession. Elsewhere, in a contemporaneous lectures-on-music volume, the Kyrie fugue was dismissed as a "barbarous confusion of sounds" (Eisen 2006). What Eisen pays close attention to is the way paintings of Mozart's death and the Requiem changed over the course of the nineteenth century. In Franz Schramm's mid-century lithograph "A Moment from Mozart's Final Days," we see Mozart in bed with the score, his pupil Süssmayr at his side, Constanze in prayer, and the "grey messenger" leaving through the doorway — an intimate, private scene of death. Henry Nelson O'Neill's 1862 oil painting "Mozart: The Fulfillment of His Strange Presentiment about the Requiem" expands the bedside group, adding four singers reading through the score. ![Henry Nelson O'Neil, The Last Hours of Mozart](https://pub-70ea1917bee3420dafb13a15f6e2778d.r2.dev/articles/henry-nelson-oneil-the-last-hours-of-mozart.webp) *Henry Nelson O'Neil, "The Last Hours of Mozart" (Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)* In Thomas Shield's lithograph of around 1880, a small orchestra has been placed around the bed. And in an anonymous oil painting from around 1900, Mozart is conducting, and there are no singers at all. Eisen calls this the "most striking transformation": in this picture, the Requiem has become "a work of absolute music and the essence of the Romantic spirit." A Requiem is, by definition, a vocal work that sets a Latin liturgical text to music. When the singers disappear from the painting, what disappears with them is the text — the words — leaving only the music. That arrangement matches the period's image of "absolute music" (instrumental music free from words and stories), and that, in Eisen's reading, is the point. This shift in the paintings, Eisen argues, runs in parallel with the work's movement out of the church liturgy and into the concert hall. In nineteenth-century Romantic aesthetics, instrumental music — music free from words and stories — was held up as the highest art form, the one most capable of expressing the human interior. The performance history points the same way. The first performance took place on 10 December 1791, five days after Mozart's death, at the Michaelerkirche in Vienna, as part of the funeral Mass — a liturgical use. In January 1793, a benefit concert for Constanze was held, also in Vienna (Keefe 2012). From the early nineteenth century onward, the Requiem was performed by choral societies and in concert halls across Europe — Covent Garden in London in 1801, a student performance at the Paris Conservatoire in 1804, plus performances in Mannheim, Braunschweig, Leipzig, and Frankfurt (Eisen 2006). The occasions on which it was performed also drifted away from specific commemorations: it came to be used at the funerals of figures such as Beethoven and Napoleon, as a piece that stood for death itself, beyond any particular religious context (Eisen 2006). E. T. A. Hoffmann put it pointedly: > The Requiem, when performed in the concert hall, is no longer the same music: it is a saint making an appearance at a ball. > > — E. T. A. Hoffmann (via Eisen 2006) ### "Art Religion" and "Transfiguration" (Elizabeth Kramer) Elizabeth Kramer follows a different route (Kramer 2006). She places at the center of her argument the early-nineteenth-century German notion of "art religion" (*Kunstreligion*) — the idea that art, rather than being mere entertainment, should be revered the way faith is. According to Kramer, around 1800 in German-speaking Europe, concerts, composers, and musical works each came to be regarded as bearing a sacred quality. Audiences listened with something close to devotional contemplation; composers were addressed as deities; the musical work itself was seen as more capable than any other art form of revealing the divine. Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder's *Outpourings of an Art-loving Friar* (1797) and *Fantasies on Art for the Friends of Art* (1799) are early central texts in this current (Kramer 2006). This deification of composers took concrete forms. In August 1810, the leading music journal of the day, the *Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung*, described Mozart, Haydn, and J. S. Bach as the "trinity of beauty, truth, and goodness" — Haydn as the Father, Bach as the Son, and Mozart as the Holy Spirit (Kramer 2006). Mozart's friend Joseph Anton Bridi, a banker, built a "Temple of Harmony" between 1810 and 1827. Its cupola was frescoed with the apotheosis of music: Mozart, though the youngest of the composers, is the first to be crowned with laurel as he sweeps through the air toward the "temple of posthumous fame." Richard Wagner wrote in his short story *An End in Paris* (1840): > I believe in God, Mozart, and Beethoven … I believe in the Holy Spirit and the truth of the one indivisible Art … the true disciples of high Art will all be transfigured. > > — Richard Wagner, *An End in Paris* (1840), via Kramer 2006 Kramer herself notes that the tone of Wagner's surrounding prose suggests his creed may have carried a measure of irony. But irony or not, the very fact that one could speak of composers in the language used for the Christian God belongs, she emphasizes, to the framework of the time. The central concept of Kramer's essay is the term embedded in that creed — "transfiguration" (German *Verklärung*). Originally a Christian concept (Matthew 17:1, where Jesus is transfigured on the mountain in shining glory), it was secularized around 1800 into a vocabulary for talking about artists, works, and listeners undergoing spiritual transformation. When this concept was applied to Mozart's Requiem, the comparison often invoked was with the Italian Renaissance painter Raphael Sanzio (1483–1520) and his altarpiece *The Transfiguration of Christ* (1516–20). Raphael, too, died young (at 37) while at work on what would be his final masterpiece, which was then finished by his pupil Giulio Romano and others. Mozart died at 35, Raphael at 37; both were working on their summit pieces; both works were brought to completion by other hands. That biographical parallel was attractive to early-nineteenth-century critics (Kramer 2006). The figure who developed this parallel most fully in print was Friedrich Rochlitz, the editor of the *Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung*. In an anecdote of 1798, Rochlitz wrote that Mozart became "convinced he was writing this work for his own funeral" and "labored, like Raphael at his *Transfiguration*, in the constant awareness of his approaching death, and delivered, as Raphael had, his own transfiguration" (Kramer 2006). This is the earliest formulation, in something like canonical shape, of the story of "the dying genius composing his own Requiem." Rochlitz also called Mozart's Requiem "the first of the new religious music," describing Mozart as a composer who had tried to raise sacred music to its rightful throne. What matters is the new category he used — not "church music" (*Kirchenmusik*) but "religious music" (Kramer 2006). The criterion for evaluating the work shifted away from its liturgical function and toward the listener's spiritual experience. In an essay of 1814, "Old and New Church Music," E. T. A. Hoffmann placed Mozart's Requiem as the "paragon of religious music," locating it within an "invisible church" — "the community of art's servants, for whom earthly demise meant spiritual transfiguration" (Kramer 2006). With that, the frame is complete: religious music is no longer tied to the church liturgy, but is the site of spiritual experience for the artist and listener. Kramer then turns to the 1820s "Requiem controversy" (*Requiemstreit*) — the debate over which parts of the Requiem were by Mozart's own hand and which were Süssmayr's completion — and argues that this was not simply a quarrel over facts. Gottfried Weber held that the authenticity of the work should be judged by historical criteria rather than aesthetic ones, while Adolf Bernhard Marx defended the work on the grounds that "Mozart's spirit pervades the whole, even where other hands had a part." For Kramer, this is a clash between two musical worldviews — one grounded in historical fact, the other in the spirit of the composer. ### A Collective Understanding that Includes the Legend (Simon P. Keefe) Simon P. Keefe argues that the enduring power of the Requiem lies in the fact that historical fact and the legend that grew up around it are inseparable (Keefe 2012). Within weeks of Mozart's death, an announcement based on information from Constanze was already in circulation; her testimony entered Franz Niemetschek's biography in 1798, and from there the story was further elaborated. Keefe characterizes this as "an imaginative engagement with circumstances of composition where the boundaries between fiction, quasi-fiction, and fact are blurred" — and as having shaped the collective understanding of the Requiem with an intensity, he writes, that is "perhaps unrivalled" by any other work in the Western canon. Keefe also argues that separating fact from non-fact is neither fully possible nor, hermeneutically, even desirable. He calls Mozart's autograph score "the document in which myths and musical realities collide," and takes the position that the work should be understood with both — the facts of the score and the legend together. A further point Keefe stresses is that, while the legend focuses on Mozart alone, the finished Requiem is not Mozart alone. Since the Second World War, he notes, Süssmayr has often been treated as "a musical cog in Mozart's wheel"; the scholarly inattention to Süssmayr's other works is itself a sign of this bias. Yet it is Süssmayr's completion that turned the fragment into a finished, performable work, and contributed to the Requiem's critical success. The reason Süssmayr's musical presence has come to feel unwelcome to many critics, in Keefe's analysis, is that biographical interpretation has flowed into musical interpretation. --- ## Closing What we hear today as Mozart's *Requiem* is not only the unfinished score he left behind in the last year of his life. It comes layered with Eybler's and Süssmayr's completions; with Constanze's testimony as it passed through Niemetschek's biography and Rochlitz's serialized anecdotes in the *Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung*; with the early-nineteenth-century German framework of *Kunstreligion* and *Verklärung*; with the legend of the bedside rehearsal and the changing iconography of the paintings; with the work's drift out of the liturgy and into the concert hall. The piece reaches us through all of those layers. The image of "the dying genius's consoling music" is not, in itself, wrong. But knowing which layer it belongs to — Mozart's own time, the facts of the score, or the nineteenth-century framework — sharpens the resolution at which we hear the work. --- ## Sources - Cliff Eisen, "Mozart's Leap in the Dark" (in Simon P. Keefe ed., *Mozart Studies*, Cambridge University Press, 2006) - Elizabeth Kramer, "The Idea of Transfiguration in the Early German Reception of Mozart's Requiem," *Current Musicology* 81 (Spring 2006), pp. 73–107 - Simon P. Keefe, *Mozart's Requiem: Reception, Work, Completion* (Cambridge University Press, 2012) - Clemens Kemme, "The Domine Jesu of Mozart's Requiem: Theory and Practice of its Completion," *Dutch Journal of Music Theory* 14/2 (2009), pp. 84–103 - Richard Maunder, *Mozart's Requiem: On Preparing a New Edition* (Oxford University Press, 1988) - Peter Shaffer, *Amadeus* (play 1979; film version, dir. Miloš Forman, 1984)