Mozart: Requiem Lacrimosa | SO & GC | CM Berlin

In the 1960s, a sketch by Mozart of an Amen Fugue surfaced. It can be assumed that it was intended for the Requiem when Mozart wrote it down: Not only is there a sketch for the Rex tremendae and the Magic Flute on the same page, written like the Requiem in 1791, but there are also striking compositional references to the Introit. Moreover, Mozart did not work on any other work during this period in which the word “Amen“ appears. The arrangement of the reeds in Mozart’s manuscript, as has sometimes been pointed out, does indeed leave far too little space for an extensive fugue at this point, but the exchange and insertion of further reeds was common and also occurred in Mozart’s work. It is surely no coincidence that in the years immediately before his death Mozart devoted himself to Handel’s Messiah, which concludes with an extended Amen fugue. For the overall architecture of the Requiem, such an Amen Fugue, roughly in the middle of the work, can form a supporting pillar which, together with the pillars at the beginning and end of the work, Kyrie and Cum sanctis tuis, forms a great arched architecture. In the Amen Fugue, which was realised for the new edition, Mozart’s view of Bach is particularly evident, partly because it is also very clear in the Kyrie Fugue. It is impossible to imagine what Mozart would have invented, or perhaps had already invented. Nevertheless, the new addition was about the thought experiment of deducing the extent and nature of Mozart’s instructions from everything that exists in someone else’s hand. In this way, it is possible to derive - only incompletely, hypothetically, of course - instructions for completing the Requiem as a “whole“, based on Mozart’s presumed intentions in the form of general procedures, melodic material, contrapuntal constellations, harmonic progressions, instrumental accompaniments, concrete borrowings from older works by Mozart or Handel and Bach, and so on. Once I had uncovered this “composing backwards“, I tried to compose the Requiem forwards again, starting from the music Mozart had written up to his death and the influences he bundled in the Requiem.