Click above to listen to the Director's Notes

Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.

Musicologist Scott Burnham produced an unassumingly slim but exceedingly rich volume titled Mozart’s Grace in 2013, the year after I began my tenure with Princeton Pro Musica, and the year after we first performed Mozart’s Requiem, at my first concert. Burnham’s book opens with a caveat from the theologian Karl Barth: “Whoever has discovered Mozart even to a small degree and then tries to speak about him falls quickly into what seems rapturous stammering.” Indeed, it’s difficult to find words on par with music that, in Burnham’s estimation, “seems somehow pre-made, [which] glows with a self-sufficiency that has less to do with ‘unity’ and more with apartness: untouched, untouchable.” 

I’ll try, however foolhardy the attempt may be, to say a few things about the music (and I’d be a fool not to share some of Burnham’s words). But first, when engaging with Mozart’s Requiem, its sketchy, shadowy origin story demands that one say a bit about the context of its creation. In 1791, Mozart was hard at work on two operas – The Magic Flute and La Clemenza di Tito. But in spite of his music’s being universally celebrated and performed today, in his lifetime Mozart’s music met mixed success, leaving him and his family flirting sometimes with impecuniousness. So when a wealthy count offered, upfront, half a handsome commission fee for a setting of the Latin Requiem text, Mozart felt compelled to accept the additional work. He started writing at the end of the summer of 1791 but then paused to oversee and conduct the premiere of La clemenza di Tito in Prague. At some point early that fall, he began to show signs of physical and mental ill health. Though he picked the Requiem back up in September upon return from Prague, in mid-October his wife Constanze took the score away from him, concerned about his burying himself obsessively in the work, spooked by his premonition that he might be writing the piece for his own death. He got back to work at the end of November, but would be dead by 5 December 1791, leaving the Requiem unfinished. The first two movements were performed at a Requiem Mass for Mozart himself five days later. The widowed Costanze, in desperate need of the remainder of the commission, saw that the work was completed by Mozart’s students, namely Franz Süssmayer. The commissioned piece was delivered to the Count, who presented the premiere in 1793. 

That the work was shrouded in mystery and shadowed heavily by Mozart’s own death surely has something to do with its prominent place in the repertoire. The tragedy of the ill-fated composer’s untimely death makes the possibility that he was knowingly composing his own Requiem too captivating to resist. Beguiling questions of authorship resulting from the incomplete state of the manuscript tighten the heartstrings of musicologists eager to discover what the dying composer intended for his final musical statement. Long before Amadeus reinserted the piece into the popular imagination, Mozart’s Requiem held musicians and audiences in thrall and received performances at memorials for Haydn, Beethoven, Chopin, and Napoleon, among others.

Performing the piece requires one to choose: since we don’t have an all-Mozart version, which version will we do? Beyond the Introit, Mozart’s manuscript contained the vocal parts for the Kyrie through the Hostias, with sketches and indications for various aspects of the instrumental parts and orchestration. It contains nothing for the Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei as well as the final Communion. For most of the Requiem’s history, conductors and ensembles had no choice but to perform Süssmayer’s subpar attempt to flesh out the torso into something whole. We can presume that Süssmayer’s attempt honors some sketch materials or instructions given verbally by Mozart himself, but it is bruised by errors in harmony and voice leading uncharacteristic for Mozart. More problematic, for me, at least: The orchestration in Süssmayers’ familiar completion is, at its very best, ample and sonorous; at its worst, turbid, lumpen, and unimaginative. In more recent times other scholars have fashioned new “completions” of the work in attempts to improve upon perceived shortcomings in Süssmayer’s. Princeton Pro Musica and I present one such attempt by pianist and Mozart scholar Robert Levin, who used a variety of materials, including Süssmayer’s completion, to create an alternate version that ameliorates some of the deficiencies of Süssmayer’s. Levin states that “the goal was to revise not as much, but as little as possible, attempting in the revisions to observe the character, texture, voice leading, continuity and structure of Mozart’s music. The traditional version has been retained insofar as it agrees with idiomatic Mozartean practice.” From my vantage point as a conductor and professional orchestrator, Levin’s completion eschews some of the more opaque textures of other completions, leaving more of Mozart’s hallmark translucence, gifting the instrumentalists more of the feel of Mozart’s easy filigree under their fingers.  

But enough about all that. Mystery, lore, and musicology are not nearly as captivating as Mozart’s actual music. As a child, Mozart traveled the European continent, absorbing regional styles and fashions, reimagining them in his own voice. The resulting musical style has been hailed by generations of performers, teachers, and musicologists as the paragon of Enlightenment elegance and balance. Those Mozartean characteristics grace the Requiem, but the work also reveals the composer’s abiding interest in the counterpoint and affekts of the Baroque era and the technical prowess and artistic determination to explore it.

And what better inspiration to deploy these contrasting musical inclinations than the Latin Requiem Aeternam. Throughout, both within and among movements, Mozart, who in 1791 hadn’t engaged sacred texts in almost eight years but had fully formed as an opera composer and musical dramatist, capitalizes completely on the possibilities of his appointed text. Just thirty-six yet staring down his demise, feverishly inking what he thought might be his last ever musical statement, Mozart draws taut drama from the juxtaposed promises and perils of Catholic eschatological dogma. His music winches the pull between the sublime but impersonal salve of liturgical ritual and the individual believer’s deathbed desperation, the pristine peace of heaven and the acrid flames of hell. Salvation and damnation stand shoulder to shoulder. 

Mozart’s voice comes through most clearly in those components of the Requiem he managed to complete in their entirety before his death. The first two sections are the only ones we have completely in Mozart’s own hand. Here, the atmosphere is unmistakeable. It opens not with the first person point of view but with the more omniscient tone of group prayer. The pearly softness of flutes and plangent sound of oboes are not to be heard here. Instead, Mozart scores the Requiem for two bassoons with two basset horns—a lower-pitched cousin of the clarinet. The woody tenor of these four instruments is revealed to us in a slow motion chain of suspensions, keening above the short, searching foot falls of the strings’ offbeats. Burnham’s description is too good not to share whole: 

[It’s] richly shadowed, removed from the world, yet not ominous. The effect is much like stepping from the light of day into a cathedral. Once again the ancient compact is revealed, and all else falls away. This is not the stunned stasis of the awestruck individual but rather the enveloping and shared aura of solemn ritual. And yet even this shuns the usual invitation to be lugubrious and instead remains buoyant—the harmonic turns argue for mobility, for a lighter tread, even . . . for a poignant sweetness. And the backbeat chordal texture lightens what would be a trudging rhythm—we step not with heavy chords on our backs but with the bass line under our feet. . . . Mozart makes reference to older models of religious music in his Requiem, lending his own style a new solemnity. But the lightness remains. Trombones mark the entrance of the voices with three upbeat quarter notes, as though heralding the entrance of the priests, reminding us once again of the special role of trombones in sacred music, the thrill of their dusky grandeur. Trumpets and drums join on the last upbeat, and now the majesty of Death is upon us, with instantaneous effect.

This dramatic treatment continues apace. The first few stanzas of the famous Dies Irae sequence depicting the “day of wrath” gallop out of the gate, with the full choruses’ fever-pitched sense of dread stacked in big bloc chords, surrounded by hard pumping string figures and fanfaring trumpets. The subsequent Tuba Mirum presents the more stern voice of a solo trombone, and the more subjective perspective of the quartet of soloists, entering one by one. That movement’s quiet ending is shattered by the Rex Tremendae’s “tremendous majesty”—all stomping, goose-stepping crispness that nevertheless yields to a heart-shatteringly simple plea from the chorus: “save me.” The interweaving string lines of the Recordare unspool like dancers pitter-pattering around a stage to weave silken ribbons around a central pair—basset horns or pair of vocal soloists—mirroring each other in slow-arcing arm movements. The Confutatis makes its contrasts even more stark, exploiting extremes in articulation, register, and voicing. The tenors and basses bellow about their being “confounded” and “sentenced to the acrid flames of hell” atop a relentless unison churn in the strings. The sopranos and altos respond with a hushed plea, “hear me,” floating, ungrounded, above fluid violins. Burnham suggests that, “in fact, Mozart deploys the genders in Confutatis as if separating animus and anima, in a kind of psychic titration, the male principle shouting downward amid the din of damnation, the female floating up like Goethe’s eternal feminine.” The back and forth yields, then, with a series of genuflecting choral passages in gentle prayer. The text of the Dies Irae sequence ends with the weeping Lacrymosa. The strings, in a series of pulses and sighing responses, anticipate the poignant, lyric lines of the chorus. What follows is a rapturous, sustained ascent and crescendo—the last bars we have in Mozart’s hand.

Levin’s completion supplements the end of the Sequence with a fugal “amen,” based on a fragment in a sketch leaf from the end of Mozart’s life. Levin’s Amen has an idiosyncratic voice that isn’t quite Mozart’s but at least follows custom and provides the necessary ballast to counterbalance the intensity of the preceding movements. The non-mozartian Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei follow, and the whole work concludes with music reprising the opening.

Somehow, though, the pathos of the Lacrymosa stays with us, especially that intense crescendo. Burnham, again: “We ascend, rising through harmonic layers of hopeful color, rising still into harsher light, into the glare of the judgment to come, and upward still, onto the home dominant of the entire Requiem. Mozart went no further. As for us, we may well drop from the zenith of this dominant back into the beginning of the Introitus, as though to cycle forever through these sacred scenes, as though to complete the Requiem ourselves, to make it endlessly whole.” The rich text of the Requiem is laden with possibility for a composer of Mozart’s imagination and deftness, and his setting is one of the finest, even as it stands incomplete and as its modest proportions are dwarfed by later composers’ creations. Perhaps it’s the tragedy surrounding its creation or the mystery of its being unfinished. Perhaps it’s because of the way its music taps something so palpably human in its reach for something beyond us. For whatever reason, the Requiem, more so than the unfinished C Minor Mass, keeps us wondering, returning to the well every so often to re-imagine what might have been, to try, as Burnham so beautifully imagines, to “make it endlessly whole.” Fortunately for all of us, the scraps we have will forever slake our thirst for Mozart’s matchless music. Rest assured, this won’t be our last draw.