All about Mozart’s Requiem

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died on Dec. 5, 1791, with a bit of unfinished business. At only 35, he could have reasonably expected to finish his Requiem Mass but alas, he completed only the first movement.

And then, intrigue. A little back story: Earlier that year, Austrian aristocrat Franz von Walsegg had asked the composer to write a Requiem to honor his wife, who had died at 20. Mozart got half the money up front, with the rest to be delivered upon completion of the work.

But Mozart didn’t know it was Walsegg who commissioned the piece. The count intended to put his own name on the score (which he’d been known to do in the past). To keep his identity a secret, he sent a messenger dressed in a cloak to make the request.

Mozart’s young widow, Constanze, was in dire financial straits upon her husband’s death and needed Walsegg to believe the Requiem was finished so she could collect the rest of the commission. Enter several of Mozart’s contemporaries, whom Constanze approached to help finish the work.

First up was Joseph von Eybler, who worked on several movements that Mozart had apparently sketched out a framework for, before giving up and handing it over to Franz von Süssmayr.

Süssmayr borrowed some of Eybler’s work and added movements (Santus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei) that would normally be part of a Requiem. The final section, Lux Aeterna, he adapted from Mozart’s notes, which Constanze insisted was done according to her husband’s directions. These include “a few scraps of paper with music on them … found on Mozart’s desk after his death,” according to the book Mozart's Requiem: Reception, Work, Completion, by musicologist Simon P. Keefe.

In any event, the completed, cobbled-together score was finally sent to Walsegg with Mozart’s forged signature. The deceptions, misdirection and, one could say, cloak-and-dagger machinations contributed to the mythology that still surrounds the Requiem. (It figured in the plot of Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play Amadeus and the Oscar-winning movie adaptation, although the hypothesis that Antonio Salieri had a hand in composing the work is largely due to the imagination of Alexander Pushkin, whose 19th-century play Mozart and Salieri inspired Shaffer.)

Whatever its provenance, it is still revered today. Listen to the Requiem, and see if you can tell where Mozart leaves off and his imitators begin!