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click to zoomWolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
Requiem  (KV 626)  1791
Courtesy of the Music Department Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna

 

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Austrian National Library
Vienna
Austria

Mozart’s Requiem
1791

The circumstances surrounding the creation of Mozart's Requiem have given rise over two centuries to romantic exaggerations and wild speculation. The commission, delivered to Mozart by a 'grey messenger'—portrayed as a harbinger of the composer's own premature death—was already the stuff of legend in the nineteenth century and became the basis for dramatic works on Mozart's life in the twentieth century. While the reality is somewhat more prosaic, the Requiem itself remains one of the most personal, impassioned and profound of Mozart's works.

In the summer of 1791, Mozart received a commission for a Requiem Mass from an intermediary of Count Franz von Walsegg-Stuppach. The Count planned to have the Requiem performed on the anniversary of his wife's death. Mozart was at this time also engaged in the composition and premiere of the operas La Clemenza di Tito and The Magic Flute. At his death on 5 December 1791 Mozart had only been able to complete the first movement of the Requiem's score—the Introit: Requiem—and to write part scores of nine of the following 13 sections.

Mozart's wife Constanze arranged for Joseph Eybler and then Franz Xaver Süssmayr to complete the work. The final score also contained the handwriting of a third collaborator, Jakob Freystaedtler.

The text at the head of this last page of Mozart's autograph score—the Arbeitspartitur'Fac eas Domine de morte transire ad vitam' is translated into English as 'Let, o Lord, souls enter through death into eternal life'. The words that can be seen written twice at the right hand edge of the page—'quam olim da capo'—are instructions that, in a performance, the fugue from the 'Domine' can be repeated with the beginning of the text 'Quam olim Abrahae promisisti' ('As once you promised Abraham'). In 1958 a piece of the lower right hand page containing the words 'quam olim da capo' was torn off and stolen, and has been lost ever since.