In the summer of 1791, a stranger called at Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's lodgings in Vienna with an unusual proposition: a commission for a Requiem mass, generously paid, on one strict condition — the composer must not try to discover who was asking for it. Mozart, chronically short of money, took the down payment. Within six months he was dead at thirty-five, the Requiem unfinished on his desk, and the anonymous messenger had grown in the retelling into a gaunt figure in grey — an emissary of Death himself, come to order the composer's own funeral music. Mozart, ill and overworked, reportedly came to half-believe it.
The truth, pieced together in the nineteenth century, is stranger for being so petty. The client was Count Franz von Walsegg, a music-loving aristocrat from Stuppach whose young wife Anna had died that February. Walsegg had a hobby: he commissioned works from real composers, copied them out in his own hand, and passed them off to his private musicians as his own compositions, enjoying the parlour game of letting them guess the author. The Requiem for his wife was to be his masterpiece by proxy. The secrecy clause was not supernatural; it was a plagiarist protecting his cover story.
Death interrupts
Mozart worked on the Requiem in the autumn of 1791 between other jobs — that year also produced The Magic Flute and the opera La clemenza di Tito. By late November he was bedridden with fever and swelling; he died in the small hours of 5 December 1791. The cause was recorded at the time as "severe miliary fever", and modern retro-diagnoses range from rheumatic fever to kidney failure. What he was not, on any serious evidence, was poisoned. The rumour that court composer Antonio Salieri murdered him circulated within decades, was dramatised by Pushkin, and was given its definitive form by Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus and the Oscar-winning 1984 film — magnificent drama, and biographical nonsense. Salieri and Mozart were professional rivals who also respected each other; Salieri later taught Mozart's younger son.
At his death, only the opening movement, the Requiem aeternam, was fully orchestrated. The Kyrie and the sequence, and the Offertory (through to the Hostias), existed as a skeleton — vocal parts and bass line with sketches of instrumentation — and the famous Lacrimosa broke off after just eight bars. The last music Mozart ever wrote trails into blank staves on the words "homo reus" ("guilty man").
The widow's problem
His widow Constanze now faced a very practical crisis: no finished Requiem meant no final payment, and possibly a demand to return the advance. The work had to be completed, quietly, and delivered as pure Mozart. She first approached Joseph Eybler, a composer Mozart had admired, who orchestrated parts of the sequence and then gave up. The job passed to Franz Xaver Süssmayr, Mozart's pupil and assistant, who had the advantage of having discussed the piece with the dying man — and, usefully, handwriting that resembled his master's. Süssmayr completed the Lacrimosa, wrote the Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei more or less from scratch (how much was his own remains one of musicology's longest-running arguments), and solved the ending by recycling: the final Lux aeterna repeats the music of the opening movement and the Kyrie fugue, so the Requiem ends with music that is authentically Mozart's.
The completed score was delivered to Walsegg, who copied it out and conducted it as "Requiem composto del Conte Walsegg" in December 1793 in memory of his wife. But Constanze had outplayed him: to raise money she had already allowed performances and kept copies, and a benefit performance in Vienna in January 1793 had beaten the count to his own premiere. When the score was later published under Mozart's name, Walsegg could hardly sue without confessing the scheme.
The Requiem's afterlife has been enormous: it was sung at memorials for Haydn, at Chopin's funeral in 1849 by his own request, and at countless services since. And the arguments have never stopped — scholars still produce rival completions to replace Süssmayr's, and biographers still untangle myth from ledger. A dying genius, a masked messenger, a forged masterpiece and a widow's bluff: no opera librettist would have dared invent it. The most famous Requiem in history was commissioned by a fraud, finished by a student — and belongs, in every bar that matters, to the man who didn't live to hear it.
Quiz nuggets
- Mozart's Requiem was secretly commissioned in 1791 by Count Franz von Walsegg, who intended to pass it off as his own work in memory of his wife.
- Mozart died on 5 December 1791, aged 35, leaving the Lacrimosa broken off after eight bars.
- The Requiem was completed mainly by Mozart's pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr, after Joseph Eybler abandoned the task.
- The story that Salieri poisoned Mozart is myth, popularised by Pushkin and the 1984 film Amadeus.
- Mozart's Requiem was performed at Chopin's funeral in 1849 at the Polish composer's own request.