MOZART REQUIEM

Saturday, may 11, 2024 — all saints parish, brookline

= program notes =

by Michael Barrett

The world recently learned that the ancient city of Pompeii, preserved to an unparalleled degree by a deadly volcanic eruption, has revealed a few more secrets, in the form of several wall paintings of scenes from Greco- Roman mythology. The rarity of a site like Pompeii reminds us of how much of the past has been lost: not just the destruction and degradation of physical objects, but the inevitable loss of knowledge that puts those objects, and the people who used them, into their full context.

The past of European art music is preserved through hand-written scraps of paper (or hide), on which are drawn some doodles that sort of mean what they do today. We have recordings only from the late 19th century, and so all music before then is recorded in a medium that, in a sense, has nothing to do with sound and its transmission. Most of these written documents contain far fewer details about performance style than one typically finds in a modern score. One can infer from other artifacts, like writings on music, that there was more a “house style” in certain times and places. This is that historical context that can fill in so many gaps between the written scrap of music and its realization in sound, and that is so challenging to recover.

In a sense, the Mozart Requiem does not exist. It exists like the Venus de Milo exists, in that we have only a portion of the whole. Unlike the Venus de Milo, whose arms were presumably attached at some point, Mozart on his deathbed never managed to finish the piece, or at least never managed to get his ideas on paper. Millions have admired the delimbed Venus, but most concertgoers would likely have a more disappointed reaction if only those notes that Mozart actually wrote down were played in performance. Incomplete music tends to satisfy less than the unfinished objet d’art.

The first completion came about not for aesthetic, but practical reasons. Mozart’s widow needed a completed work to fulfill the obligations of the contract with one Count Walsegg, who commissioned the Requiem from Wolfgang for his wife’s funeral, hoping to pass off the work as his own. Franz Süssmayr, one of Mozart’s students, took on the task, but by most accounts his talents paled in comparison to those of his teacher.

So we were left with a completion that, uncharitably, recalls the infamous “restoration” of the Jesus portrait from about a dozen years ago. (I’ll leave it to you to Google it, if you dare.) Süssmayr, unlike the painting’s restorer, didn’t so much obliterate Mozart’s original, but by adding clumsy counterpoint and failing to follow up on common principles of the architecture of Requiem settings from the period, it is as if, on some level, Süssmayr allowed his musical brush to paint over some of the teacher’s original strokes.

Thus in the ensuing centuries, several other composer-musicologists have taken it upon themselves to “re- restore” Mozart’s unfinished last work. Like with the (more typical) restoration of a painting, the restorers had to ask themselves what they felt was original to Mozart’s hand and/or mind.

This is not as easy a task as it may seem, or to put it more positively, there is sometimes more original material to work with than meets the eye. This is the contention of Robert Levin, the musical polymath who has, among many other accomplishments, made a specialty of late 18th-century improvisation, a skill expected of performers of that time and quite rare in our own day. Levin noted some significant discrepancies of quality between some of the movements and passages not in Mozart’s hand, concluding that we likely have more of Mozart’s ideas about the Requiem preserved than mere graphology would reveal. Furthermore, Levin makes an argument in favor of using a fragment of an “Amen” penned by Mozart as the jumping off point for a completed Amen to include in the Requiem. There are compelling connections, not just of key but motive.

I am tempted to detail what is Mozart and what is not, and this would make perfect sense for a musicological monologue, but in the context of a performance experience, I am less inclined to reveal the seams between definitely Mozart, possibly Mozart, and Levin-in-the-Mozart-style, leaving you to make your own educated guesses. Even better, perhaps, I might suggest that you might even forget that Mozart’s body gave his mind insufficient time to complete his final musical task, and instead imagine that we present a coherent whole. It is Levin’s mission and hope, after all, that his efforts have filled in the gaps with material sufficiently in the Mozartean style such that we can enjoy Mozart’s efforts as a coherent whole. Many of us who grew up with the Süssmayr completion will of course hear some of the seams quite easily, and that fact could be the jumping off point for an entirely different discussion on musical experiences and bias. But I am content to leave our discussion here and encourage you to take in the music as it comes, (invisible) seams and all.