Musical Moments #16
To Mozart’s father Leopold: “I tell you before God, as an honest man, that your son is the greatest composer I know, either personally or by repute.”
—Joseph Haydn
The musician baptized as Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart is unrivaled for his prodigious ability and vast creative output as a composer and performer. But for the sake of introducing our musical excerpts, let us focus on the last six months of his short life.
The two undisputable facts are that the illnesses ending Mozart’s life were extensive and that his Requiem remains one of the great mysteries of classical music. In July 1791 a stranger wearing a mask and long dark cape, later identified as Franz Leitgeb, presented an already weak and compromised Mozart a letter commissioning a requiem. After Mozart agreed to the project, the stranger returned a few days later with half of the fee, with the remainder to be paid when the composition was completed and delivered.
Mozart immediately started to work with the underlying belief that he was writing a mass for his own death and that the stranger was actually a Grim Reaper figure. His work was interrupted by the need to finish the opera La Clemenza di Tito, a Little Masonic Cantata, the Clarinet Concerto, and to prepare the Magic Flute for its premier on September 30. As validated by a letter to his librettist Ponte, though Mozart was fully engaged in his other pressing work, the Requiem never left his mind. He wrote:
My head is confused. It is only with difficulty that I can keep my thoughts collected. The image of that stranger will not part from my eyes. I always see him before me; he asks, he urges me, he impatiently demands the work from me. I continue because composing tires me less than rest. . . . I feel it, my condition tells me; my hour has struck. I shall have to die. So, I am finishing my funeral dirge. I must not leave it incomplete.
At fifty-five minutes past mid-night on December 5, 1791 Mozart died with his Requiem unfinished. This left his wife Constance scrambling to find someone who would might complete the work so she could collect the full commission. Eventually, a past student and friend, Franz Xaver Süssmayr, who visited Mozart often during his final illness, took over the task of completion, and because he could imitate the master’s handwriting, no one was the wiser.
During his lifetime, Mozart had been no stranger to illness with a long history of upper respiratory infections, staph infections and other serious conditions such as rheumatic fever. In his last month, though clearly with his health rapidly declining, Mozart pushed on. The painful swelling in his hands and legs did not keep him from an outing, believed his last one, to a Masonic meeting on November 19, coincidently during an epidemic in Vienna. He undoubtedly spent the remainder of his life, just over two weeks, bed-ridden and dictating the on-going work. Deriving conclusions from notes left by Mozart’s own physicians and extensive research, contemporary physicians, Drs. Bär and Davies theorize that Mozart died from streptococcal infection, Schönlein-Henoch Syndrome, renal failure, cerebral hemorrhage and pneumonia.
And now, as famed radio broadcaster Paul Harvey used to say, “The rest of the story.” The mysterious stranger negotiating the Requiem was representing Count Franz von Walsegg, who eventually took Mozart’s music and passed it off as his own. The work was finally performed by Walsegg in December 1793 in remembrance of his recently departed wife. It took nearly a decade for Walsegg to admit the piece was really the work of Mozart. But more than two centuries later, we still don’t know whether Süssmayr’s additions to finish the piece followed directions given by Mozart or if they were original. All scholars concur that the portion of the Requiem we are hearing today is pure Mozart.
The three short movements are, “Dies irae,” (Day of wrath that shall dissolve the world into embers), “Tuba mirum,” (Wondrous trumpet will summon all to the throne), and finally “Rex treméndae majestatis,” (King of fearful majesty).
The vocal quartet in “Tuba mirum” is comprised of Sharla Nafziger, soprano, Adriana Zabala, mezzo-soprano, Daniel Weeks, tenor, and Michael Dean, bass. The trombone solo is beautifully played by our own Jeff Thomas.
With the exception of his operatic writing, Mozart’s compositions starting in June 1791 with “Ave Verum Corpus” K.618 to his Requiem K. 626 reflect a sustained seriousness rarely found in his earlier works. I believe that the frantic and profound treatment of the text reveals a frightened and fragile man in his last days. Keep in mind that the last words we sing in today’s excerpt are “Sálva me” or “Save me.”
“O Mozart, immortal Mozart, how many, how infinitely many inspiring suggestions of a finer, better life have you left in our souls!”
—Franz Schubert