Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Requiem

Mozart’s Requiem is impossible to hear entirely apart from the fact that he did not live to finish it. Composed in Vienna during the final months of 1791, the Requiem in D minor, K. 626 was left incomplete when Mozart died on 5 December. That circumstance has attracted legend for more than two centuries, but the surviving manuscript tells a more interesting story than myth alone: a major work existing in different degrees of completion, then carried towards performable form by musicians working after Mozart’s death.

The commission came from Count Franz von Walsegg, who wanted a requiem for a service marking the first anniversary of the death of his young wife Anna. Mozart completed and orchestrated the Introit, while other movements survive in more developed or fragmentary drafts. The autograph includes substantial material for the Kyrie, Sequence and Offertorium; famously, Mozart’s own writing in the “Lacrimosa” breaks off after its opening bars.

After his death, Joseph Eybler worked on the score before Franz Xaver Süssmayr completed the version that became most widely performed, adding or finishing later sections including the Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei.

That complicated authorship does not reduce the music’s emotional force. The opening “Introitus” enters with dark orchestral colour before the chorus establishes an atmosphere that is solemn rather than merely mournful. The “Dies irae” is urgent and terrifyingly direct; the “Tuba mirum” brings solo voices into a more spacious conversation; the “Lacrimosa” turns grief into a rising choral plea. Across the work, four vocal soloists, chorus and orchestra continually shift the scale from individual supplication to collective judgement.

Stories later grew around the mysterious commission, including the idea that Mozart believed he was writing the Requiem for his own funeral. The documented circumstances are stranger enough, including Walsegg’s intention to present the work under his own name. What matters on the turntable is the tension the history leaves behind. This is both a Mozart composition and a work shaped by incompletion, assistance and uncertainty. Rather than trying to separate those layers while listening, hear how remarkably coherent the music remains despite them.