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
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