15/12/2022
The Requiem Revealed
In the evening of 10 December 1791 the Requiem may have been played for the first time! Gathered in St Michael’s Church in Vienna to attend the memorial for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the audience may have listened to the heavenly music that Mozart only ever heard within himself. As the Requiem unfolded to the world, Mozart was offering humanity his last, most precious gift, and the proof that he will go on living forever, through his divine Music.
Four days after the burial, so the 'Auszug aller europäischen Zeitungen' (European Press Digest) of 13 December reported, the Viennese “celebrated solemn obsequies for the great composer Mozart” in St. Michael’s Church. On the sixteenth, the Viennese journal 'Der heimliche Botschafter' (The Secret Messenger), which circulated in scribes’ copies, identified the music at this service as “the requiem he composed during his final illness…” “In view of the manuscript’s unfinished condition, only the first movement, and perhaps the second with some instrumental touches added, could have been performed with orchestra; the other sections very likely took the form of Mozart’s choruses sung by a quartet and supported by organ continuo; plainchant might have filled the missing sections.”
This is how Mozart’s Requiem may have sounded like, on that day of 10 December 1791…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emniYHcqxqQ
Prague marked Mozart’s death four days later with a requiem (a setting by Franz Anton Rossler, also known as Antonio Rosetti) in St. Nicholas’s, packed by a throng of more than four thousand overflowing into the surrounding streets.
It has taken perhaps two hundred years for the world to realize fully and in all its aspects what this loss has meant to music – and to humanity. Haydn said: “Posterity will not see such a talent again in 100 years!” Posterity has not seen it in two hundred.
Professor Dr Michael Lorenz: “This is the standard work about the Requiem at St. Michael’s: ‘Mozart and the Practice of Sacred Music, 1781-1791‘ by David Ian Black”
http://www.academia.edu/11604023/Mozart_and_the_Practice_of_Sacred_Music_1781-91
"Whether it was Mozart’s Requiem that brought the composer’s Todesamt to a successful completion may never be known for certain. The allegation that the Requiem was performed does not appear in the most well-informed account of the occasion, and is based entirely upon two further sources of unknown provenance. There is no doubt that the service itself did occur and featured music of some kind, but the surviving documentation from St. Michael’s cannot offer confirmation for the newspaper reports that some form of K. 626 was heard. The emotional power of the “Requiem for Mozart” story is considerable, suggesting as it does that some of the composer’s colleagues organised the copying, rehearsal and performance of a work out of respect for its recently deceased creator. If the story is true, it is somehow appropriate that the very first commemorative act for Mozart should take place during the performance of a work deemed a “masterpiece” by Michael Haydn and a “miracle” by Albrechtsberger – but most importantly, a work in Mozart’s “favourite form of composition.” "
David Ian Black
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_RfFH27Ddo
