Warren Ottey, Music Director

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CHEERFUL NOTES

When I think on the magnitude of Mozart’s genius, I am reminded of a remark I heard long ago in a speech by President John F. Kennedy to a top “think tank” of his day: “When I look about the room, I am in awe of the collective genius gathered around me in this place.  I dare say that in all American history there has not been this magnitude of brain power in a single room since Thomas Jefferson sat alone in his study at Monticello!”  JFK could have said the same thing about Mozart as he sat alone, composing or playing the keyboard, or one of the many other instruments he had mastered before he reached the age of 18.  He was simply light years ahead of all of his peers in composing and performing!  And his REQUIEM might be the greatest of all of his marvelous works.

    

When the 35-year-old Mozart died in the early morning hours of December 5, 1791, after singing, though bedfast, through all of the completed sections of the REQUIEM along with some colleagues, he left the work unfinished.  But in less than three months later, a completed score of the REQUIEM was delivered to its anonymous commissioner.   Mozart had received the commission to compose the work in July of 1791, from a mysterious “Gray Messenger.”  The messenger paid half of the commission in advance, but insisted upon guarding his patron’s anonymity.   The composer had already accepted another commission to compose an opera, La Clemenza di Tito, for the coronation of King Leopold II as King of Bohemia.  Mozart completed the opera in 18 days and conducted at its premiere in Prague on September 6th.  

 Mozart then furiously worked on a revision of his greatest opera, The Magic Flute, completed it, and conducted its premiere on September 30th.  On October 7th, he completed his Concerto in A for Clarinet.  From October 8th through November 20th, he composed the motet, Ave Verum Corpus (our chancel Choir sings it as Jesu, Word of God Incarnate), and worked on his final horn concerto and the REQUIEM.  In his exhausted state, he became convinced that the mysterious Messenger had come to warn him of his own mortality and that he was indeed composing the work for his own death.  Concerned with this morbidity, Mozart’s wife, Constanze, hid the REQUIEM score from him and forbad him to work on it for a few weeks.  When he resumed work on it in mid-November, he became ill and took to his bed.  His friend and student, Franz Xaver Süssmayr, sat at his bedside and took dictation of the score from the composer, whose hands were too swollen for him to be able to use a pen.  Süssmayer was one of the singers at Mozart’s bedside on the afternoon of December 4th, when Mozart broke into uncontrollable sobbing while singing the beginning of the famous Lacrimosa movement.  He died less than twelve hours later.

 In dire need of money to support herself and her two young sons, Constanze asked several noted composers to complete the REQUIEM so that she could collect the balance of the commission.  Each composer, after briefly working with Mozart’s score, felt unequal to the task.  Mozart’s students Freystädtler and Eybler filled in some of the orchestration, but it at last fell to Süssmayr to actually complete the score.  Constanze gave him scraps of paper on which Mozart had sketched ideas for the unfinished portions of the Requiem, many of which Süssmayr discarded in his haste.  He was able to imitate Mozart’s handwriting and rushed to meet the February deadline imposed by the Messenger.  Süssmayr forged Mozart’s signature on the title page of the finished score and gave no indication that he had composed any part of it.  After the delivery of the score, Mozart’s widow set about to destroy her husband’s unused sketch leaves.

 Constanze Mozart was not content with the fee she received from the Messenger and had two copies of the REQUIEM made for her own use.  She sold one to King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, and in 1799, she sold the other one to publishers Breitkopf & Hartel of Leipzig.  Learning of this pending publication, the anonymous patron, Franz Count von Walsegg, finally revealed himself.  The Count confessed that he had commissioned the work in honor of his late young wife, Anna, and had passed it off as his own composition at her memorial service.  With that confession a great controversy arose, fueled also by a letter to the publishers from Süssmayr, who claimed that he had composed three of the movements of the work himself.

 The ensuing controversy has continued for the more than 200 years that the Mozart REQUIEM, in Süssmayr’s completed form, has been performed to great acclaim in the great concert halls, cathedrals, and churches of the world. 

 In spite of many errors that musicologists and composers, such as Brahms, agreed that Süssmayr had committed in his hurried completion, it seemed that history had decided to accept the version that was delivered to Count Walsegg as definitive.  But musicologists and lovers of Mozart’s music continued to speculate about how the REQUIEM would sound if Mozart had lived to finish it.

      Then, in 1960, musicologist and Mozart expert Wolfgang Plath discovered some previously unknown sketches for the REQUIEM in a collection of Mozart manuscripts in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek.  The sketches, which had likely escaped Constanze’s destruction because they were bundled with sketches for The Magic Flute, were genuinely in Mozart’s hand.  The most important sketch indicated that the aforementioned Lacrimosa was to end in an “Amen” fugue.

     This discovery gave the noted Mozart scholar Robert Levin the final clue he needed to complete his own solution to the mystery of the unfinished REQUIEM, which he had pursued since he graduated from Harvard magna cum laude in 1968, writing a thesis titled The Unfinished Works of W. A. Mozart.

With the Plath document in hand, Levin reconstructed the “Amen” fugue and also corrected many of the errors in voice leading and instrumentation found in the historic completion of the REQUIEM, while still respecting the overall work that Süssmayr accomplished in the stressful period following  Mozart’s untimely death.  The resulting Levin completion is breathtaking, and it will perhaps become, after 200 years, the definitive version of Mozart’s unfinished REQUIEM.        

     It should be of great interest to Christians to learn that virtually all of Mozart’s works in the last few months of his life had deep spiritual significance and spoke to his faith in God and his belief that he would be among those redeemed by Jesus Christ in heaven.  But that is material for other columns, and perhaps even a book, in future years.  For now, it is my hope and prayer that those of you who listen to Mozart’s REQUIEM will receive a great measure of the blessing that God has showered on us who have studied it, assimilated it, and prepared it for today’s performance.  In the immortal words of another giant among composers, Johann Sebastian Bach, Soli Deo Gloria!

 

From Your Minister of Music,

Warren Ottey

 

 

 

 

 

 

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