{"id":1434,"date":"2022-04-16T21:04:54","date_gmt":"2022-04-16T19:04:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mozartiana.org\/blog\/?p=1434"},"modified":"2024-10-19T22:53:06","modified_gmt":"2024-10-19T20:53:06","slug":"mozarts-leap-in-the-dark-re-reading-the-requiem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mozartiana.org\/blog\/mozarts-leap-in-the-dark-re-reading-the-requiem\/","title":{"rendered":"Mozart’s Leap in the Dark: Re-reading the Requiem"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The first book devoted entirely to Mozart\u2019s Requiem, by Albert Hahn, a small-town music director in northern Germany, describes the work in this way: \u2018Now . . . we find ourselves in the beautiful morning light, led there by the inspired composer who through his passionate art banishes the loneliness of the barbaric night after long years of struggle.’1<\/a><\/sup> Hahn\u2019s account attributes to the Requiem a character that was common-place for much of the later nineteenth- and most of the twentieth-century as well.  Abert, Saint-Foix, Bruno Walter and others describe the work as consoling, the pious, personal expression of a dying genius.  For Eric Blom, the Requiem alternates \u2018noble grandiloquence\u2019 with \u2018heart-searching supplication\u2019 while Karl Geiringer described it as \u2018a composition as transcendental as it is human . . . it leads us gently towards peace and salvation.\u2019  Alfred Einstein wrote that, whoever composed the later parts of the work, \u2018The total impression remains.  Death is not a terrible vision but a friend.\u20192<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

These characterizations derive in part from Mozart\u2019s famous letter to his father of 4 April 1787, barely a month before Leopold\u2019s death:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Mozart to his father, 4 April 1787<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind that his image is 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 . . . to learn that death is the key which unlocks the door to our true happiness.  I never lie down at night without reflecting that\u2013young as I am\u2013I may not live to see another day.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This letter, reprinted in most Mozart biographies since 1828,3<\/a><\/sup> is freighted with biographical implications: its nobility and faith is a reflection not only of Mozart\u2019s profoundly-held beliefs, but also strengthens us to accept his own premature death with the courage and trust we believe the composer himself must have displayed \u2013 a courage and trust evident in the Requiem.\u00a0 But does it really reflect Mozart\u2019s attitude toward death?
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In November 1771 Mozart witnessed a hanging in Milan yet it elicited no particular reaction from him; on the contrary, he wrote to his sister: \u2018I saw four scoundrels hanged in the cathedral square. They hang people here just as they do in Lyon.\u2019 And when Leopold\u2019s favorite poet, Christian F\u00fcchtegott Gellert<\/a>, died in 1770, Mozart wrote to his sister: \u2018I have nothing new except that Herr gelehrt [Herr learned, a pun on the name Gellert], the poet from Leipzig died, and since his death has composed no more poetry.\u2019\u00a0 Voltaire\u2019s death prompted Mozart to write, \u2018that godless arch-rascal Voltaire has pegged out [crepirt<\/em>] like a dog, like a beast\u2019 (letter of 3 July 1778) and when the court violinist Joseph Hafeneder died in 1784, Mozart was sorry chiefly because it would mean extra work for his father teaching the boys at the Salzburg chapel house (letter of 20 February 1784).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the same token, early accounts of the Requiem say nothing about its consoling character.  Ignaz Arnold, in his Mozarts Geist<\/em> of 1803, noted the work\u2019s \u2018gloomy seriousness and dark melancholy\u2019 while Christian Friedrich Schwenke looked in vain for the \u2018pious humility of expression proper to such a solemn appeal to the mercy of the Redeemer.\u2019  During the so-called Requiem-Streit<\/em> of the 1820s, Gottfried Weber asserted that the \u2018Confutatis\u2019 could not be by Mozart because it \u2018emphasizes, con amore<\/em>, the egotistical baseness of the words and by the ferocious unison of the stringed instruments maliciously incites the Judge of the World to hurl the cursed crowd of sinners into the deepest abyss.\u2019  Hans Georg N\u00e4geli, in his Vorlesungen \u00fcber Musik<\/em>, objected to the many violent changes of key and arbitrary alternations of major and minor that turn the Kyrie fugue into a \u2018barbarous confusion of sounds.\u20194<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How is it, then, that the Requiem acquired its consoling character? And is there another way to read the work, one closer to Mozart\u2019s late eighteenth century?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2018Someone should have painted [a picture of] the dying Mozart, the score of the Requiem in his hand\u2019 wrote Nissen in his biography of 1828.\u00a0 In fact, they did, but only later.\u00a0 And what these pictures show is a transformation, not only in the representation of Mozart\u2019s death, but in the meaning of the Requiem as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The earliest, a lithograph by Franz Schramm titled Ein Moment aus den letzten Tagen Mozart\u2019s<\/em>, probably dates from mid-century.\u00a0 It shows Mozart with the score of the Requiem open on his lap; his amanuensis Franz Xaver S\u00fcssmayr receives last minute instructions from the composer on how to complete the work; his wife, Constanze, prays at the foot of a crucifix in a room off to the side; and an unidentified stranger \u2013 no doubt the \u2018grey messenger\u2019 who brought the Requiem commission to Mozart in the first place \u2013 appears to be leaving through the main door.\u00a0 It is an intensely private scene, inhabited only by the composer, those closest to him and the spirit of death itself who, presumably having delivered his message, takes an unsympathetic leave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Franz Schramm, Ein Moment aus den letzten Tagen Mozart’s <\/em>(c1855)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Henry Nelson O’Neill, Mozart: the fulfillment of his strange presentiment about the Requiem<\/em> (1862)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Henry Nelson O\u2019Neill\u2019s Mozart: The fulfillment of his strange presentiment about the Requiem<\/em> from 1862, elaborates on this scene.  Mozart once again has the Requiem on his lap; Constanze and S\u00fcssmayr are there too, as well as Sophie Haibel, Constanze\u2019s sister.  The \u2018grey messenger\u2019 has disappeared but four men read through the work for Mozart.  A cello and a violin lie silent at the foot of the bed.  This picture purports to represent a gathering at Mozart\u2019s house on 4 December 1791, a gathering first reported in the 1827 obituary of Mozart\u2019s friend Benedikt Schack, the first Tamino in Die Zauberfl\u00f6te:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As soon as he had completed a number, he had it sung through, and played the instrumental accompaniment to it on his piano.  On the very eve of his death, he had the score of the Requiem brought to his bed, and himself (it was two o\u2019clock in the afternoon) sang the alto part; Schack, the family friend, sang the soprano line, as he had always previously done, Hofer, Mozart\u2019s brother-in-law, took the tenor, Gerle, later bass singer at the Mannheim Theatre, the bass.  They were at the first bars of the Lacrimosa when Mozart began to weep bitterly, laid the score on one side, and eleven hours later, at one o\u2019clock in the morning . . . departed this life.<\/em>5<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Thomas Shield, Mozart on his Deathbed<\/em> (c1880)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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O\u2019Neill\u2019s painting is more active, more crowded than Schramm\u2019s.\u00a0 And Thomas Shield\u2019s lithograph of ca. 1880 is more crowded still: in addition to Mozart, Constanze and S\u00fcssmayr, the performance of the Requiem is now accompanied by a small orchestra and a keyboard players, in addition to the four singers. It is no longer a private performance and Mozart\u2019s death is no longer a private death: both have gone public.\u00a0 It is, rather, the death of the artist.\u00a0 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Or at least this is what a final picture, an anonymous oil painting from the end of the century, shows.\u00a0 Here is the most remarkable transformation of all: not only does Mozart, still in his heavenly white night shirt as if a divine light shines on him – or perhaps in his burial dress, propped up in his coffin – conduct<\/em> the work \u2013 he is a nineteenth-century director-artist, not an eighteenth-century participant-performer \u2013 but there are no singers.\u00a0 The Requiem has become a work of absolute music and the essence of the Romantic spirit.6<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Anonymous, Mozart on his Deathbed<\/em> (1890s)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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The pictorial transfiguration of Mozart\u2019s death from the private to the public, and of the Requiem from sacred to secular absolute music, mirrors the performance history of the work.\u00a0 Almost from the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Requiem was performed by choral societies and in concert halls across Europe.\u00a0 It was given at Covent Garden in 1801, by students of the Paris Conservatoire in 1804, and in Frankfurt, Mannheim, Braunschweig, Leipzig and Frankfurt.\u00a0 A performance at Breslau was prefaced by two movements from Haydn\u2019s Trauer<\/em> symphony; in Berlin it was given with the overture to Gluck\u2019s Alceste<\/em>.7<\/a><\/sup> This appropriation of the Requiem as secular did not go unchallenged.\u00a0 When it was given in German at Leipzig in the spring of 1801, an anonymous correspondent for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung<\/em> wrote: ‘Connoisseurs will in any case prefer to hear this work with the original text, not only because Mozart here more than anywhere was bound by each individual word of the text\u2013realizing the enormity of his vision, the darkness of his ideas, the authentically gothic ways in which they are combined\u2013but also because it probably cannot be realized adequately in any barbaric modern tongue. . .\u00a0 We cannot put it any other way\u2013it is transformed into a Protestant (or if you prefer, \u2018enlightened\u2019) parody.’<\/em>8<\/a><\/sup> <\/em> More pithily, E. T. A. Hoffmann wrote: \u2018The Requiem, performed in the concert hall, is not the same music: it is the appearance of a saint at a ball!\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But appropriated it was and not only by choral and philharmonic societies for public concerts.\u00a0 Before long, the Requiem came to represent the celebration of death in general, of both the great and the small: in Berlin it was given during a period of mourning for the Queen mother; at Leipzig it was played in honor of General Ma\u00e7on, the Imperial French governor of the city; and a performance in Prague in 1801 to honor a local music patron, one Freyherr von Ledebour, made such an impression that \u2018a few days later two citizens requested that it be performed at memorial services for their relatives.\u20199<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 More than that: the Requiem came to symbolize the death of greatness, the death of art, and the death of the human spirit.\u00a0 It was a musical centerpiece at the funerals of Heinrich von Collin, of Weber, Beethoven and, later, Napoleon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Franz Xaver St\u00f6ber, Beethoven’s Funeral in front of the Schwarzspanierkirche, Vienna<\/em> (1827)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

This celebration of death as a manifestation of the human spirit, as an event to be glorified for its profoundly human<\/em> character, was a new idea.\u00a0 For much of the eighteenth century, death had been something to fear.\u00a0 One strain of thinking, best represented in Edward Young\u2019s poem Night Thoughts<\/em> of 1742, encouraged aspirations towards a \u2018good\u2019 death, one in which an appropriate, moral life is led and death foreseen and properly prepared for.\u00a0 Widely translated and admired, Young\u2019s work was intended to serve as a \u2018catalyst in the cultivation of hopes of eternal life\u2019:10<\/a><\/sup> Lessing regarded it as a masterpiece of the sublime while Goethe acknowledged its influence on his Die Leiden des jungen Werthers<\/em>. A more virulent strain, however, saw death as horror.\u00a0 In his poem The Grave<\/em> of 1743, Robert Blair wrote: ‘. . . The grave, dread thing! \/ Men shiver when thou\u2019art named: Nature appall\u2019d \/ Shakes off her wonted firmness.\u00a0 Ah!\u00a0 How dark \/ Thy long-extended realms, and rueful wastes! \/ Where nought but silence reigns, and night, dark night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Robert Blair, The Grave<\/em> (first edition, 1743)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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William Blake, Illustration for The Grave<\/em> (1805)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Blair\u2019s gothic vision was equally potent, inspiring images of graveyards, solitary mourners, night scenes and ruined abbeys, even if it was short-lived.  By the beginning of the nineteenth century, such horrific scenes were overtaken by images of Arcadian memorial gardens that sought to banish decay, decomposition and graveyards, a trend was already evident in the late eighteenth century: Cajus Lorenz Hirschfeld\u2019s Theorie der Gartenkunst<\/em> advocated, on English models, the introduction of memorials in the form of urns, columns and buildings in gardens.  This was a reaction not only to earlier images, but to the unsanitary, malodorous, chaotic conditions of late eighteenth-century burial as well and it resulted in schemes such as Ren\u00e9-Louis Marquis de Girardin\u2019s Elys\u00e9e for Jean-Jacques Rousseau<\/em> at Eremonville, later a model for Henriette Caroline of Hesse-Darmstadt\u2019s Herrengarten<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ren\u00e9-Louis Marquis de Girardin, Elys\u00e9e for Jean-Jacques Rousseau<\/em>, Eremonville<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

It was out of these memorial gardens, and the view that burial grounds could \u2018become a means of social engineering, promoting reason and calm,\u201911 <\/a><\/sup>that the modern cemetery arose.\u00a0 An official decree of 12 June 1804 drew up rules for the construction of French cemeteries, prohibiting them in churchyards and towns, and ordering them to be built outside urban areas, planted with trees and shrubs.\u00a0 The cemetery \u2013 and death \u2013 was banished, distant from physical, everyday reality, a haven of peace and repose.\u00a0 Pere-Lachaise became the prototypical nineteenth-century funerary garden.\u00a0 (In Vienna, Joseph II instituted similar reforms as early as 1784, removing graveyards beyond the city limits, but these reforms grew out of economic and public health concerns, not philosophical or social-engineering ones.\u00a0 Paradoxically, one of his regulations served only to increase the sense of horror associated with death, abandoning the corpse to nature: \u2018The only objective in burial is to promote decomposition as soon as possible, and there is no greater hindrance to this process than burial in coffins. Thus it is recommended for the present that bodies be sown unclothed [and buried] in linen sacks.\u2019\u00a0 This generated such a storm of protest that in 1785 Joseph issued a court circular rescinding the regulation: \u2018[People] go to great lengths to ensure their bodies will decay slowly after death, and thus remain stinking carrion for as long as possible. So I no longer care how they want to be buried.\u2019)12<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Moses Mendelssohn, Phaedon, oder die Unsterblicheit der Seele<\/em> (Berlin, 1767), title page<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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There is a broader context within which these concerns can be situated: the debate over the immortality of the soul.\u00a0 Moses Mendelssohn\u2019s Phaedon, oder die Unsterblicheit der Seele<\/em> of 1767, a vigorous defence of immortality, was widely read; Mozart even owned a copy.13<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 But this was not the only view.\u00a0 [Phaedon image] Arguments denying immortality had already asserted themselves in the seventeenth century.\u00a0 Thomas Hobbes argued that to believe in immortality was to forsake not only rational thought but Nature as well, while David Hume proposed that man\u2019s fear was proof enough that death ends all: Nature would not imbue us with such horror unless there were something to fear.14<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The French philosophes<\/em> similarly rejected the idea of immortality.\u00a0 For them, death was an unpleasant natural accident and immortality a priestly lie that inhibited the achievement of a better life in the here and now.\u00a0 This was not to deny immortality altogether, or at least some form of immortality: Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, in his Outline of the Progress of the Human Mind, <\/em>may have been the first to promote the idea that the prolongation of life, the achievement of immortality, was not a function of belief in religion but of belief in man and his capacity to extend natural, vital forces.\u00a0 Here, at least, is a point of contact with Kant, even if he rejects Condorcet\u2019s notion of a similarity between the achievement of moral perfection and the processes of nature.\u00a0 In his Dreams of a Spirit-Seer<\/em>, Kant asserted the existence of immaterial natures, including the soul, as well as his belief in moral perfectability through practical reasoning of moral experience.\u00a0 And in the Critique of Pure Reason<\/em> he wrote that while virtue ought to produce happiness, this was not the case; instead, \u2018virtue is attainable only if there is infinite progress, hence there must be another life.\u2019\u00a0 Since the achievement of the highest good is the necessary object of a moral will, this obligation must be capable of fulfillment – accordingly, the obligation itself already argues for immortality.15<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In effect, Kant reinscribes wherein the immortality of the soul lies: in man, not in religion.\u00a0 And his argument was powerfully taken up by later philosophers and poets.\u00a0 Johann Gottlieb Fichte transformed Kant\u2019s reasoning into an assertion of the primacy of the Ego:\u00a0 \u2018Even my body may decay and become dust,\u2019 he writes, \u2018this body is not I. . .\u00a0 Long after the youngest among the millions of suns which shine over my head has sent forth its last rays of light, I shall still remain, unaltered and intact, the same as I am today.\u201916<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 This is absolute Ego, Hegel\u2019s \u2018World Spirit,\u2019 a higher moral life that demands perfection and is therefore eternal.\u00a0 This \u2018World-Spirit\u2019 – seen by Novalis as a reservoir of untapped possibilities, the \u2018elevating [of] the lower into the higher\u2019 and by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling as subject to an odyssey \u2018which strives to return to itself\u201917<\/a><\/sup> \u2013 rehabilitates both death and immortality as not only positive, but exclusively human.\u00a0 As such, death is glorified and celebrated: poets write of good deaths, city planners build garden cemeteries, philharmonic societies perform the Requiem in concert halls, and artists paint Mozart\u2019s dying moments as a work of absolute music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But this is to travel far into the nineteenth century, to a time when the Requiem, as a result of these various cultural forces \u2013 historical, artistic, literary,18<\/a><\/sup> religious and philosophical \u2013 could appropriately be read as a work of consolation. \u00a0And if this constellation, especially as it gave rise to interpretation, crystallized only about the middle of the century, then it may be that there is another cultural model \u2013 whether Mozart subscribed to it or not \u2013 that explains the early reception of the work as barbaric and terrifying, a model that locates the work in a late eighteenth and early nineteenth century where death was not necessarily the noble end and goal of the human spirit, but was something, as Blair described it, to be feared, at a time when immortality was being questioned.\u00a0 Even the Freemasons, their belief in eternity notwithstanding, paint a bleak picture of death.\u00a0 In his funeral oration for Mozart, Karl Friedrich Hensler wrote: ‘Decay! \u2013 I do not believe that human nature can conceive anything more terrifying, more awesome than this!\u00a0 Accustomed as we are to looking upon our body as a vital part of our being, unacquainted with the nature, the condition and the particular occupations of our mind divorced from it\u2013and then the thought: soon this body will disintegrate into dust or, according to circumstance, become the habitat and food for vile insects. . . .\u00a0 Each day that we live, each hour that we number, night itself and sleep:\u00a0 all is either an image or a summons of Death for us.<\/em>‘19<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2018Et lux perpetua luceat eis\u2019 (\u2018And grant them eternal light\u2019) \u2013 surely a metaphor for immortality \u2013 becomes in Mozart\u2019s setting of the Requiem a catalyst for confrontation, uncertainty, fear and decline. [The following discussion centers chiefly on the ‘Introit’ – see immediately below for a score that can be consulted in conjunction with this discussion, or that can be downloaded.<\/em>] The text occurs three times in the Introit: first mediating between \u2018Requiem aeternam\u2019 and \u2018Te decet hymnus\u2019 (m. 15) and again at the end, twice in succession (from m. 43).\u00a0 But the third and last statement is remarkable: the text collapses in on itself, without the internal repetitions of the two previous occurrences; the basset horns and bassoons fall silent; the strings give up their aggressive unison gesture; and the voices fall in register, occupying only the lower parts of their ranges.\u00a0 A slow chromatic descent brings the movement to an inconclusive end.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n