The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Requiem, K. 626 · the Mass for the Dead in eight sections and fourteen numbers, for soprano, alto, tenor and bass soloists, four-part chorus and orchestra · in Latin: the liturgical text · begun by Mozart in 1791 and left unfinished at his death; completed by Franz Xaver Süssmayr, after a first attempt on the sequence by Joseph Eybler · about fifty to sixty minutes in performance
Mode
Requiem Mass for the liturgy of the dead; double fugue and concerted drama held in one dark sonority, choral and solo numbers in turn
Mythos
The Last Judgment: the trumpet over the graves, the judge, the world as ash; the pit of the Offertory; light asked for at the end
Phase
The Mass for the Dead from Introit to Communion, eight sections in fourteen numbers; the end sung to the music of the beginning
Presentation
Concert music; four soloists, four-part chorus, two basset horns, two bassoons, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, strings and organ continuo; no flutes, oboes, clarinets or horns
Register
From the solo trombone’s call and the double fugue to the gentle solo quartet and a plain chordal Amen; dark throughout, with no treble wind
Scale
One soul before the judge, the church for all the faithful departed, the world as ash, Abraham to the Last Day; about an hour
Governing Proposition
The Latin Mass for the Dead is set in one dark sound, without a high wind voice, from the prayer for eternal rest to the prayer for eternal light, and in the sequence the prayer for the dead becomes the plea of one person who will be judged. The wager of the work is that terror and trust can be held in one voice at once. The plea breaks off where Mozart’s hand stops, at the eighth bar of the Lacrimosa, and other hands carry it on to the end and back to the music with which it began.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The work begins with its darkest voices. Over the strings the bassoons enter, then the basset horns, one after another, before the trombones bring in the chorus: “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine”
“Grant them eternal rest, Lord.” The orchestra has no flutes, no oboes, no clarinets and no horns. Two basset horns, two bassoons, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, strings and organ make the whole of its colour, and the absence of a high wind voice decides the sound of the work in its first bars. The prayer is for others. The dead are “them”, and the living ask on their behalf.
The Introit goes on to a psalm verse for the soprano, set on an old psalm tone, and the Kyrie follows as a double fugue, archaic counterpoint at full strength. Both openings are widely heard as related to Handel: the Introit’s first idea to his Funeral Anthem for Queen Caroline, the Kyrie’s subject to “And with his stripes” from Messiah. The work begins by looking back. What it makes new is the colour in which it holds what it inherits: the fugue of the old church and the drama of the theatre in one dark sound, with basset horns and trombones at its centre.
The Requiem was begun in 1791 on an anonymous commission, and it was unfinished when Mozart died, on 5 December 1791. Of its fourteen numbers the Introit alone stands complete in full score in his hand. In the Kyrie the voices and the figured bass are his, and the orchestral doublings were supplied by other hands. The work is the Requiem as it has lived for more than two centuries, completed, and every part of it, whichever hand made it, belongs to it. Where the hands divide, the division is part of what is heard.
Movement II
The sequence comes in six numbers, and with it the Last Day. The Dies irae is terror at speed. Then a solo trombone sounds the trumpet of the text: “Tuba mirum spargens sonum per sepulchra regionum”
“The trumpet, scattering its wondrous sound through the tombs of every land.” The trombone’s call is among the cues Mozart sketched, and the instrument is the one the words name. The soloists follow it one after another, and the summons that began over every grave narrows, voice by voice, toward one person.
The soprano asks, “Quid sum miser tunc dicturus?”
“What shall I, a wretch, say then?” and all four close together on “cum vix justus sit securus”
“when even the just man is scarcely safe.” The liturgy began by praying for them. Here the one who prays finds himself among the judged, without a defence. From this point the sequence speaks as “I”, and the setting makes that turn its disclosure. Terror and trust are not resolved into each other. Both are held in one voice, and neither cancels the other.
The Rex tremendae is very short, and every bar carries. The chorus hails the king of dreadful majesty in dotted rhythms, and the majesty breaks into supplication, drawn down to a whisper: “salva me, fons pietatis”
“save me, fount of mercy.” The Recordare opens with the two basset horns in canon, and the soloists remind Christ why he came: “Recordare, Jesu pie, quod sum causa tuae viae”
“Remember, kind Jesus, that I am the cause of your journey.” In all these numbers the voices and the bass are Mozart’s, with the leading instrumental lines and cues he sketched. Joseph Eybler made a first attempt on the sequence; Süssmayr completed it.
Movement III
The Confutatis divides the choir. The men sing the damned: “Confutatis maledictis, flammis acribus addictis”
“When the accursed are confounded and given over to the fierce flames”; the women answer, “voca me cum benedictis”
“call me with the blessed.” The two halves are one thought. Fierce and tender in turn, the voices stage the separation of the damned from the saved, and the self stands between them, asking to be counted with the second.
Then the whole choir kneels: “Oro supplex et acclinis, cor contritum quasi cinis”
“I pray, kneeling and bowed, my heart crushed as if to ash.” The harmony descends in a chain, passing through key after key without a weak join, and the descent is the self going down into the dust. It is the coldest height in the work, and the hinge into the Lacrimosa. The Confutatis is Mozart’s in its voices and bass throughout.
The Lacrimosa’s choral line rises by semitones to its prayer for the day “qua resurget ex favilla judicandus homo reus”
“on which guilty man shall rise from the ashes to be judged.” After those words, at the eighth bar, the autograph stops. The rising line is Mozart’s; its arc is carried on by Süssmayr, who keeps the shape of the opening but not its density, and ends the number with a plain chordal Amen. A short sketch for an Amen fugue, on a leaf that also carries work for the Rex tremendae, came to light in the twentieth century; Süssmayr did not use it. The work carries the seam of its maker’s death inside its most famous number, and goes on.
Movement IV
From here the work is more and more in other hands. Of its fourteen numbers, nine are Mozart’s in substance, the voices and the bass; one, the Lacrimosa, is begun by him for eight bars; three, the Sanctus, the Benedictus and the Agnus Dei, survive in no source of his; and one, the Communion, is his music set to new words. In full score one number of fourteen is wholly his, and Süssmayr orchestrated everything after the Introit. The completion belongs to the work, for better and for worse. It is the form in which the Requiem has been sung for more than two centuries.
The Offertory is Mozart’s in its voices and bass, with some cues. The Domine Jesu prays for the souls “omnium fidelium defunctorum”
“of all the faithful departed”, that they be delivered from the pit, “ne absorbeat eas tartarus”
“that hell may not swallow them up.” Dread returns, and the dark band of basset horns, bassoons and trombones makes the underworld audible. The prayer rests on an ancient promise, “quam olim Abrahae promisisti et semini ejus”
“which once you promised to Abraham and to his seed”, and the Hostias offers sacrifice and prayer of praise on their behalf.
No autograph of Mozart’s survives for the Sanctus, the Benedictus or the Agnus Dei, and Süssmayr claimed them as his own; whether he worked from sketches or instructions of Mozart’s cannot be known. The Sanctus’s Hosanna is a conventional fugato. The Benedictus, a solo quartet in a major key, is gentle and graceful but discursive, and the Hosanna that follows returns in the Benedictus’s key rather than its own, loosening the frame the rest keeps. Here the music rarely rises, and the dark manner of the first two thirds gives way to a lighter, more ordinary church style. The Agnus Dei is well made, and with it the height returns.
Movement V
The Communion brings back the beginning. It sets “Lux aeterna luceat eis, Domine”
“Let eternal light shine on them, Lord” to Mozart’s music from the Introit, and “Cum sanctis tuis” to the fugue of the Kyrie. Rest and light, asked for at the start, are asked for again at the end with the same music, unanswered and unchanged, and the prayer has returned from “me” to “them”. That this was Mozart’s own wish was said in the completion’s circle and cannot be verified. It is the completion’s most consequential decision: the work closes its ring with its maker’s music in another’s arrangement.
The completed score was delivered to the commissioner, Count Franz von Walsegg, bearing a signature and date in Mozart’s name that were not in Mozart’s hand, and Walsegg had the work performed as his own, a memorial for his wife. Breitkopf & Härtel first published it in 1800, and the completed score has been the standard text ever since. Mozart’s autograph survives in Vienna, and the fragment stands beside the completion. In the 1820s Gottfried Weber attacked the work’s authenticity, and the question of what is Mozart’s, what is Süssmayr’s and what lost sketches lay between them has stayed open since.
In the late twentieth century the question produced a run of new completions, by Beyer, Maunder, Robbins Landon, Druce, Levin and others, each a fresh reading of the whole; Maunder’s leaves out the Sanctus and the Benedictus altogether. The great majority of performances still sing Süssmayr’s. Unlike the Bach Passions, the Requiem never left the repertoire; it passed from a single office for the dead to the concert hall and to public mourning, and the dramatic requiems of the next century stand in its line. Its plea breaks off at the eighth bar of the Lacrimosa, and the work goes on to the light it asked for at the start.
Act III · The Twelve
Apply the subtractive test to the sequence and almost nothing yields. The Rex tremendae is very short and every bar carries, its dotted majesty drawn down to “salva me, fons pietatis”
“save me, fount of mercy”. The Confutatis cannot lose either half: the men’s curse and the women’s plea are one thought, and the descent of “Oro supplex” is the hinge into the Lacrimosa. The test bites in the completion. Süssmayr’s Hosanna fugato is conventional, his Benedictus graceful but discursive, the Hosanna’s return adds little, and Maunder’s later completion leaves out the Sanctus and Benedictus with the work still standing. The liturgy compels those sections, not this music for them. The Communion’s return of the opening is required: the work must end where it began.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The liturgy speaks of the dead in the third person, “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine”
“Grant them eternal rest, Lord”, and the sequence turns to the first person. Mozart’s setting makes the turn its disclosure, in the sound as much as in the words. In the Tuba mirum the summons over every grave narrows, voice by voice, until all four close on “cum vix justus sit securus”
“when even the just man is scarcely safe”; in the Confutatis the self stands between the damned and the saved. What comes into the open is a stated condition, a meaning and not a mood: a person facing death holds terror and trust at once, and neither cancels the other. What holds the axis is that the text is given, and that Süssmayr’s Sanctus and Benedictus return to conventional praise.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Height and frequency are both very great. The opening, bassoons and then basset horns entering in turn over the strings before the trombones bring in the chorus, is among the most recognisable elevations in the repertoire. The Kyrie’s double fugue is grandeur in counterpoint; the Dies irae is terror at speed; the Tuba mirum opens on a solo trombone; the Rex tremendae is majesty broken into supplication. The Confutatis reaches a cold, vertiginous height in the descent of “Oro supplex”, and the Lacrimosa’s line rising by semitones is a summit, its first eight bars Mozart’s and its arc carried on by Süssmayr. The Domine Jesu is dread again. Frequency falls in the last third, where the Sanctus and Benedictus rarely rise: nine numbers of fourteen reach real height.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The archetype is the Latin West’s governing image of death, the Last Judgment: “Tuba mirum spargens sonum per sepulchra regionum”
“The trumpet, scattering its wondrous sound through the tombs of every land”. The text evokes it; the work builds it. The solo trombone is the trumpet of the text made sound, and the dark band of basset horns, bassoons and trombones makes the Offertory’s underworld audible. The form closes a ring: the Communion asks for eternal light to the music of the opening. The incompletion is part of the built shape: the work carries the seam of its maker’s death inside its most famous number. The legend of the stranger and the poisoning is not counted. What holds the axis is that the archetype comes with the text, built into sound but not first made by the work.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The work looks back as much as it turns. The Introit’s opening idea and the Kyrie’s fugue subject are widely heard as related to Handel, to the Funeral Anthem for Queen Caroline and to “And with his stripes” from Messiah; the soprano’s psalm verse is set on an old psalm tone; the sequence in contrasting numbers follows the concerted Mass. The departure is in the fusion and the colour, and the synthesis is complete: archaic double fugue and operatic drama held in one dark sonority, the high woodwinds removed, basset horns and trombones at the centre, the inherited remade rather than quoted. What holds the axis is the stake: an anonymous commission, a familiar form, no public risk, and a completion that adds no swerve of its own.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Change the form and much of what the work knows goes: without its darkened orchestra it loses the weight of the grave. The Confutatis is a form that thinks: male and female choirs in alternation, fierce and tender, stage the separation of the damned from the saved, and the modulating “Oro supplex” enacts the self’s descent before the Lacrimosa. The Tuba mirum moves from cosmic summons to the single voice and back to company. The ring makes the whole form an argument: rest and light, asked for at the start, are asked for again at the end with the same music, unanswered and unchanged, and the prayer returns from “me” to “them”. What holds the axis is Süssmayr’s Sanctus, Benedictus and Hosanna, conventional forms correctly filled, and the Hosanna’s return in a key not its own.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence, and of two kinds. The music has sustained more than two centuries of performance and analysis without exhausting: the Kyrie’s counterpoint, the harmonic route of the Confutatis and the Lacrimosa’s eight bars have been studied as closely as anything Mozart wrote. The completion made the work a second well. Since Gottfried Weber attacked its authenticity in the 1820s, the question of what is Mozart’s, what is Süssmayr’s and what lost sketches lay between them has never closed, and in the late twentieth century it drew a run of new completions, Beyer’s, Maunder’s, Robbins Landon’s, Druce’s and Levin’s among them, each a fresh reading of the whole. Held below the top: the last third returns little, and much of the yield concerns provenance rather than meaning.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The work fused Baroque counterpoint, Classical drama and a sombre orchestral colour into a setting of the Mass for the Dead that addresses a listener as much as a liturgy: a real reorganisation of what a requiem could be. Its influence was immediate, so little is delayed. What holds the axis is the force, made from known means and standing below the reach it achieved. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Requiem passed from a single office to the concert hall and the state funeral; the dramatic requiems of the nineteenth century, Cherubini’s, Berlioz’s and Verdi’s, and its consoling ones stand in its line; and its completion became the founding case for the problem of finishing a dead master’s work, argued through every case since.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Survival is demonstrated, in form, presence and fabric. The defining form is wholly legible: the completed score has been the standard text since its publication in 1800, and the fragment survives beside it. Presence is continuous. Unlike the Bach Passions and the Mass in B minor, which passed out of performance and had to be revived, the Requiem has never left the repertoire since the 1790s, and it is among the most performed and recorded of choral works, sung in church, concert hall and public mourning. The fabric holds: Mozart’s autograph survives in Vienna, damaged only slightly. The work has outlived the liturgical conditions that produced it. Held a step below the top by works that have survived longer with equal presence.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Mozart’s command in what he wrote is supreme, and it is the substance of the work, the voices and the bass of nine numbers of fourteen: the Kyrie’s double fugue; the voice leading of the Confutatis, whose descent passes through key after key without a weak join; the canonic opening of the Recordare for basset horns; the economy of the Introit’s scoring. Scored as one work, the charge is real and falls on the surface. Süssmayr orchestrated everything after the Introit, often heavily, trombones and trumpets doubling where Mozart’s drafted lines suggest a lighter hand; his Hosanna is perfunctory; faults of part-writing in the completed numbers have long been noted. His Agnus Dei is well made, and the Communion’s fitting of the opening music to new words is skilful. That surface is what holds the axis.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements, the Dies irae and the Benedictus: terror at speed, and a gentle solo quartet in a major key. One law holds the range together: a dark sonority, counterpoint kept close to drama, and the tension between the liturgy of the many and the plea of the one. The range runs from fugue to the operatic and obeys one physics, and the Communion’s return of the opening and of the Kyrie’s fugue restores that law at the close and binds the end to the beginning. What holds the axis is a fault line in the later numbers: Süssmayr’s Sanctus and Benedictus are set in a lighter and more ordinary church manner, and the Hosanna returns in the Benedictus’s key rather than its own, breaking the tonal law the rest observes.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The liturgy brings several orders, and the work holds them in one structure: the single conscience, “Recordare, Jesu pie, quod sum causa tuae viae”
“Remember, kind Jesus, that I am the cause of your journey”; the church interceding for all the faithful departed; the world dissolved to ash and nature itself astonished; sacred history from Abraham’s promise to the Last Day; and the sacred as the frame of all of these. The passage from eis to me and back integrates them, so that one soul and the whole of creation stand before the same judge. What holds the axis lowest is what the form cannot hold: no family, no labour and no state enter, and the orders come with a fixed text rather than being gathered by the work.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.4, then The Sublime at 9.2, then The Made at 9.0. A completed score that has been the standard text since 1800, beside a fragment that survives, and a presence in performance unbroken since the 1790s, in church, concert hall and public mourning; height reached in nine numbers of fourteen, from the dark entries of the opening and the Kyrie’s double fugue to the Confutatis and the Lacrimosa; and Mozart’s command in the voices and bass of nine numbers, from the Kyrie’s fugue to the descent of the Confutatis.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.1: the single conscience, the church, the world as ash and sacred history from Abraham to the Last Day are held in one structure, but the family, labour and the state do not enter a fixed liturgical text. Above it, The Inevitable at 8.3, where the liturgy compels the Sanctus and Benedictus but not Süssmayr’s music for them; and The Swerve at 8.4: inherited materials, from Handel, an old psalm tone and the concerted Mass, remade in a real new palette, with nothing staked on an anonymous commission and no swerve added by the completion.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 9.0, The Living Form at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.4, The Archetypal Deep at 8.8, Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 and The Unconcealment at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.4 falls a tenth short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.3, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.1. The aggregate of 8.8 stands below the summit in any case.
Basis · the score of the Requiem in D minor, K. 626, as completed by Franz Xaver Süssmayr after a first attempt on the sequence by Joseph Eybler, in the form first published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1800, and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, edition, autograph or recording was in hand, and the running time is a range across performance, not a measurement. The completed Requiem is scored as one work. What other hands made belongs to it and is credited and charged to the work, not to Mozart: the orchestral doublings of the Kyrie and the orchestration of everything after it, the Lacrimosa after its eighth bar, the Sanctus, the Benedictus and the Agnus Dei, and the Communion made from Mozart’s music for the Introit and the Kyrie. Where a strength or a weakness comes from the completion, the page says whose hand made it. The later completions, among them Beyer’s, Maunder’s, Robbins Landon’s, Druce’s and Levin’s, are not the work and serve only as evidence. The legend of the anonymous messenger and the poisoning is not weighed. The words are part of the work and are read in Latin, the Mass for the Dead as Mozart set it. The Latin is quoted only where the words are sure, and sparingly; every English gloss is the desk’s own, plain and literal, and none is taken from a published translation. Figures that could not be verified, among them the dates and places of the first performances, the date written on the delivered score, the date of Süssmayr’s claim to the last numbers, the name of the psalm tone and its precedents, the publication of the Amen sketch, the library that holds the autograph and the detail of its damage, and the memorials at which the work was sung, are not given. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.