Q Newsletter Q News 2016/2017 | Page 3

The Director of Chapel Music Writes… The Story of Mozart’s Requiem not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling!  And I thank my God for graciously granting me the opportunity of learning that death is the key that unlocks the door to our true happiness.  I never lie down at night without reflecting – young as I am – I may not live to see another day.’ A new recording by Winchester College Chapel Choir has just been released of Mozart’s Requiem, accompanied by the superb London Mozart Players, with soloists Sarah Fox, Diana Moore, John Mark Ainsley and Ashley Riches. These CDs are available from Cornflowers, or online from Convivium Records. This was a very special project for Chapel Choir and one which we greatly enjoyed preparing and recording. It started with a discussion between Adrian Green of Convivium Records and myself about future recording projects for the choir, and a shared desire to record a major work with orchestra. We booked New Hall for two days in June 2016 and set about recording the work. The hall proved to be an excellent recording venue.  Although the Quiristers had already performed the work earlier in the year with Glee Club in the Maunder completion, we decided to go back to the original Süssmayr completion for this recording, since Süssmayr, a pupil of Mozart’s, would have had a better idea than anyone about Mozart’s plans for the work, which remained incomplete at the time of the composer’s death in 1791. The various myths which have surrounded the Requiem were largely spread by his biographers after his death, and were fanciful, and those who have seen Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus, later made into the box office successful film, know well the fictional notion that the composer Salieri was the mysterious stranger who visited Mozart and paid him to write a Requiem for an anonymous patron. The real truth is just as chilling, and the stranger in grey was in fact the steward of a Viennese aristocrat, Count Franz von Walsegg-Stuppach, a wealthy amateur musician who was accustomed to hiring professional musicians to perform in his home. He also liked to commission works secretly (copying the instrumental parts in his own hand) and then asking the players to guess who was the composer was. The Count was commissioning Mozart to write this work so he could pass it off as his own. The visit of the mysterious stranger to Mozart’s door undoubtedly had an adverse effect on his health, since he saw this request as an omen of his own death. However, Mozart could not ignore the stage payments on offer to him as he was, by all accounts, considerably in debt.  Already exhausted from writing two operas, La Clemenza di Tito and Die Zauberflöte (both in production at the time), he had little energy left for a Requiem, and he died without completing the work. The story of Mozart’s Requiem is both fascinating and intriguing. In the last months of his life, the composer was perhaps as inspirationally active as he had ever been (two operas recently completed), despite his declining health. Yet the composition of the Requiem was something which weighed heavily on his mind and spirit, and haunted him greatly. As he wrote in a letter to his father in 1787, ‘as death when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the past few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind, that his image is 3