The haunting unfinished work of Mozart

In mid-1791, Mozart received an unusual commission: to compose a mass for the dead for a client who did not want to meet him face-to-face and was willing to pay a good price for the work, a total of sixty ducats of the time. This mysterious circumstance is what has given rise to many legends about the Requiem: since Mozart did not have time to finish the work —he died on December 5 of that year— and for a long time the details of the commission were unclear, it was speculated, quite fancifully, that the mass was part of a macabre plan to murder Mozart and have that music played at his funeral. But the reality is different: the client who hired Mozart was an Austrian count named Franz von Walsegg, who had become widowed in early 1791 and wanted a mass for the dead to honor the memory of his wife. Von Walsegg was also an amateur musician who invited his friends to his castle to listen to private music concerts he had previously commissioned from professional composers, which he would jokingly pass off as his own. That’s why he did not approach Mozart directly, adding to the mystery that has contributed to distorting the reality of the work.

But the fact is that Mozart did take the commission very seriously, although he had to wait until September of 1791 to start composing the mass —before that, he had to finish two operas, La clemenza di Tito and The Magic Flute— and make progress on its development. For Mozart, this commission was important, not only because it was well-paid, but because in the ten years he had spent in Vienna, he had not composed religious music, one of his main activities when he lived in Salzburg. It was, therefore, an unexpected opportunity to demonstrate his talent as a composer of masses. But, as is well known, death came to him suddenly, and although the Requiem was well-advanced, the manuscripts that his wife, Constanze, found were far from a complete work. Under different circumstances, the Requiem would have remained an unfinished draft, but for Constanze, it was important that the work had a final form: she had become a widow, without any income, and needed to collect the money from Von Walsegg. As was later discovered through rigorous musicological studies, the Requiem we hear today is largely Mozart's work —he defined the composition up to the second segment (Hostias) of the fourth part (Offertorium)— but with orchestration added by his pupils Joseph Leopold Eybler and Franz Xaver Süssmayr. The latter was the one who composed the final four parts of the work: Sanctus, Benedictus, Agnus Dei, and Communio.

Despite its final shared authorship, the Requiem is a work of unparalleled musical and emotional magnitude: not only is it one of the most well-known pieces in Mozart's extensive repertoire, but it is probably the most widely spread religious work in Western music. Its emotional power is so intense that it even transcends its original function, which is to accompany the funeral mass of a deceased person and which, according to the Latin liturgical text, explains the journey of the soul from the moment it leaves the body until it is judged by God and received into paradise, after having passed through the torments of hell and purgatory. The Requiem, therefore, is a prayer: it calls for mercy from God for both the living and the dead, so that at the end of time, all may receive the eternal light of His majesty. However, over the two centuries that separate its composition and its current reception, the Requiem has reached all cultures and, by becoming one of the most famous and sung compositions of Mozart, it has come to be solidified as a spiritual masterpiece, mysteriously conveying the deepest secrets of human existence.