Mozart’s Requiem, left uncompleted at the time of his death in 1791 at age 35, is one of classical music’s most haunting works. It has a complex history and many finer points of fact are often encased in myth — ever more so since the huge success of the 1985 movie, Amadeus.
The movie was never intended to be taken as fact, and many enduring misconceptions about Mozart — his life, work, and especially his Requiem — were revisited when the film was released. The film itself, was based on a play, Mozart and Salieri, by Russian writer Alexander Pushkin, which contains many of the falsehoods that are presented, if rather entertainingly, in the film version.
These are longstanding myths, including that Mozart’s nemesis Salieri helped complete the Requiem. We now know that Mozart’s wife, Constanze, hired a number of composers to help finish the piece. Ultimately, the composer Sussmayr completed the Requiem. We also know that Mozart began the composition amid personal financial setbacks, waning popularity in Vienna, and struggles with his health. Franz Count von Walsegg, an amateur musician who wanted to memorialize his dead wife, and possibly, pass off the work as his own, commissioned the Requiem. Mozart began working on his last piece in a state of fragile health with a looming sense that the very Requiem he was writing was his own.
In the ASO performance, Robert Spano ingeniously couples Mozart’s final utterance with Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms. “Mozart distilled in his Requiem Mass so much of his genius,” says Evans Mirageas, director of artistic planning for the ASO. “And even though he did not live to complete it that which he himself wrote is powerful, doleful, tender and speaks from heart to heart across three centuries about the ‘debt we all must pay.’”
Mirageas adds that “the perfect foil to this grand and glorious Mass is Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms. The composer himself wrote: ‘It is not a symphony in which I have included Psalms to be sung. On the contrary, it is the singing of the Psalms that I am symphonizing.’”
Atlanta writer Brooke Phillips contributes articles to Encore Atlanta and other publications.
