Fun Facts With Fitz

On Mozart's Requiem Mass in D Minor

By the middle of 1791 Mozart apparently knew he was dying. It had no effect on his output or even his travels. In the middle of that year he hastily composed an opera seria called The Clemency of Titus for a royal coronation in Prague, and went there to conduct the premiere. Far from his best, the work found no success. His letters of that period reveal an uncharacteristic brooding; "If people could see into my heart," he wrote Constanze, "I should have to feel almost ashamed-I find everything cold-ice cold." Yet a day or so later he would write with his old zest of eating a glorious meal.

The final horror arrived at his door in July 1791, in the person of a gray-clad stranger who refused to identify himself but commissioned Mozart to write a Requiem, a Mass for the dead. Accepting the commission and setting to work, he began to imagine that this stranger was Death himself and the Requiem his own. In a letter he raved, "I cannot remove from my eyes the image of the stranger. I see him continually. He begs me, exhorts me, and then commands me to work…I am on the point of death; I have finished before I could enjoy my talent…I thus must finish my funeral song, which I must not leave incomplete." (It's worth mentioning, however, that this letter may well be a nineteenth-century forgery.)

In the end he would leave the Requiem a magnificent fragment. Has there ever been more ominous music than the opening chorus? It is still firmly controlled Mozart, magisterial in tone and sensitive to every nuance of the text, but it is also the work of a man staring into his own grave. There speaks at times a depth of personal anguish that would not be heard again until the works of Beethoven's maturity. Throughout, the glow of Bachian counterpoint illuminates the Requiem; and it resonates with hope and rejoicing as much as with tragedy and death.

There is a simple explaination, by the way, for the mystery of the commission. The secretive messenger came from one Count Franz von Walsegg, a musical amateur who planned, as was his habit, to palm off the Requiem as his own work. After Mozart's death, the count confessed his scheme.

Two weeks before he died, Mozart conducted a newly written Masonic cantata for the opening of a temple. It was his last completed piece. Two days later he took to his deathbed, still working on the Requiem. Word came that The Magic Flute, which had gotten off to a slow start, was shaping into a major hit. In bed Mozart began timing the nightly performances with his watch, saying, "Now is the Queen of the Night's aria…Now comes Sarastro."

Further word arrived: some Hungarian noblemen had secured for him a generous yearly stipend that would mean the end of his financial worries. Such aristocratic endowment was the beginning of a new system for artists; Beethoven and later free-lance composers would make much of their living from such sources. Though the stipend capped a profitable year for Mozart and heralded a more secure future, it was too late.

On the night of December 4, he struggled to sing parts of the Requiem with some friends gathered around his bed. Constanze, recently returned from another spa, was there with Mozart's pupil Franz Sussmayr, who had promised the dying man he would complete the Requiem. (Sussmayr did as promised, and handsomely.) A doctor came and applied cold poultices to Mozart's feverish head; this precipitated a coma. When they checked him after midnight, December 5, 1791, he was dead.

The funeral was productive of many myths. Contrary to later legend, a number of people showed up. The services and burial were conducted to the strict- and short-lived- decrees of Emperor Joseph, which were designed to eliminate extravagant funeral services and end unhealthy burial practices inside the city walls. So, as was done with most funerals in those years, the service was held in the city, at the Cathedral of St. Stephen, and later that evening the body was carried outside the city walls for burial in a communal grave the next morning. Given that delay (partly required in case the corpse turned out not to be dead), few mourners in those days actually accompanied a body to a gravesite, which was always plain and unmarked. In fact, bodies were supposed to be interred in a linen sack and covered with lime; this may have been done with Mozart. The historical confusion entered in because burial ordinances were detested and did not long outlive Joseph. Soon they had been virtually forgotten, and thus the myth of Mozart's receiving a pauper's burial was able to flourish in the Romantic era.

Mozart died anything but a poor or forgotten man. A memorial service in Prague on December 14 brought thousands of people to hear a Requiem Mass played by the finest musicians in the city; the newspaper account concluded, "countless tears flowed in painful remembrance of that artist whose harmonies had so often moved our hearts to joy."

There was also a memorial service in Vienna, the music conducted by Antonio Salieri. For years a rumor would persist that he had poisoned Mozart. Though Salieri had possibly obstructed Mozart's career here and there, there was nothing to the rumor, nor did it damage Salieri's reputation. In fact, among other kindnesses, not long before Mozart died Salieri had sat through a performance of The Magic Flute alongside the composer and wildly applauded every number. Salieri went on to be an honored pedagogue who taught , among others, Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt- and Mozart's son Karl, who became a minor but respectable composer. Librettist Lorenzo da Ponte ended up in America, where he taught Italian at Columbia University and ran a grocery store, with a little bootlegging on the side. Constanze became a professional composer's widow, married a Danish diplomat, and survived him, too; his tombstone reads: "Here Rests Mozart's Widow's Second Spouse."

The cause of Mozart's death was laid at the time to "miliary fever," a diagnosis of vague import, later corrupted to the entirely meaningless "military fever." Current research suggests that rheumatic fever killed Mozart, probably helped along by his doctors, whose treatments included bleeding, a common and often lethal procedure of the time. In other words, neither poverty nor neglect nor poison killed Mozart, but rather the indifferent decree of the same gods who had so marvelously fashioned him.

Taken from The Vintage Guide to Classical Music, Jan Swafford, Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, Inc., New York, First Edition, November 1992.