music; europe; religion · 11 min
Sharewww.gabrielcerezo.com/article/000028?lang=en
Mozart died on December 5, 1791, at thirty-five, while working on a requiem mass he never managed to finish. A composer writing music for the dead and dying as he writes it is the kind of symmetry a novelist would throw out as too neat. But it happened, and the fact that it happened tells us something about reality that fiction rarely has the nerve to say, which is that sometimes things mean what they appear to mean.
The Requiem in D minor, K. 626, is Mozart's last work. It is also his most famous, and the one with the most legend piled on top of it, from the mysterious messenger who commissioned it to the story that Salieri poisoned him. That story is false, but Pushkin turned it into drama and Milos Forman into a film, and by now there is no getting it out of the popular imagination. Underneath the myth is a piece of music that, even unfinished and completed by other hands, is still, two centuries on, one of the most serious things a human being has produced.
That is what I want to talk about. Some of the myth and the biography can't be avoided, but my subject is what the Requiem does, and why, when it plays, verbal language falls short in a way nobody has to take on trust, because you can check it by listening.
The facts need careful handling, since they come wrapped in two centuries of embellishment. What is known for certain is that in the summer of 1791 a middleman commissioned a requiem mass from Mozart on behalf of a client who wished to remain anonymous. The client was Count Franz von Walsegg, an aristocrat and amateur musician in the habit of commissioning works from professional composers and passing them off as his own, and he wanted the requiem in memory of his late wife. Mozart accepted, took an advance and got to work. But 1791 was a frantic year, with The Magic Flute, La clemenza di Tito and the Clarinet Concerto all under way, and the Requiem came along slowly. He fell ill in November. By December he was dead and the work was left unfinished.
He left the Introit fully orchestrated and the Kyrie complete. From the Sequence, the central and most dramatic section of any requiem, there are vocal parts and figured bass for the Dies Irae, Tuba Mirum, Rex Tremendae, Recordare and Confutatis, with some partial orchestration cues. Of the Lacrimosa, eight bars. The Offertory has voices and continuo, and of the Sanctus, Benedictus, Agnus Dei and Communio he left nothing, or at least nothing that has survived.
Constanze, his widow, needed the commission money, so she asked Franz Xaver Süssmayr, a pupil of Mozart's, to complete the work. He did, and musicologists have argued over the results ever since. The sections Mozart orchestrated himself are unmistakably Mozart. What Süssmayr completed from the sketches is a grey zone, and what he wrote from scratch, the Sanctus and Benedictus above all, is Süssmayr trying to sound like Mozart, rather like a house painter trying to finish a Vermeer, and you can see the effort. Still, none of this matters as much as it seems to. What matters is how it sounds.
The opening of the Requiem is the darkest music Mozart ever wrote. The basset horns, a deep variant of the clarinet that Mozart loved and rarely used outside this work, begin with a descending figure in D minor, and the colour registers at once; nothing else in his catalogue sounds like it. He wrote in D minor only a handful of times. The best-known case is the Piano Concerto No. 20, where the key is dramatic, almost operatic. In the Requiem it is heavy. The music sinks, as if the sound itself were being dragged towards the earth.
When the choir comes in with "Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine", grant them eternal rest, Lord, what you hear is the human voice up against the fact of death. It goes looking for words and finds that the words of the rite, the ones the Church has been repeating for centuries, are at once insufficient and all there is. As a polite request to a benevolent God, it hardly qualifies.
Mozart was Catholic, which is quick to say and slow to understand. He was not devout in the conventional sense (he was a Freemason with Enlightenment friends, and never sat easily with the piety of his day), but the liturgy was in his ear, built into the very structure of his musical thinking, and he wrote the Requiem from inside the text, living in it.
The Sequence begins with the Dies Irae, the most violent text in the Catholic liturgy. Day of wrath, that day, when heaven and earth shall dissolve into ashes. It is a thirteenth-century description of the Last Judgement, and Mozart gives it music that sounds like what it describes, an eruption of orchestral and choral fury such as eighteenth-century sacred music had never heard.
Coming from Mozart, this is odd. He is the composer of balance and proportion, and even at his most dramatic, in Don Giovanni say, he keeps a formal control that never loses its elegance. In the Dies Irae of the Requiem that control sounds broken. The writing is still impeccable; what has come loose is the feeling, which spills over the liturgical function of the piece and into what Burke and Kant called the sublime, the experience of something so vast the mind can't hold it, met with a mixture of terror and fascination.
The sublime is an aesthetic category modernity has lost. Art today goes after provocation and social relevance, and seldom after the sublime, which asks for an openness to the transcendent that contemporary culture does little to encourage. Mozart's Dies Irae is sublime in the strict sense, music that sets the listener before something larger than himself and puts him in his place with a violence that terrifies and liberates at once.
The Rex Tremendae, shortly after, does something similar with even more economy. The choir sings "Rex tremendae majestatis", king of tremendous majesty, and the strings come down in descending chords like a hammer on an anvil. There is no melody in the conventional sense, only pure musical authority and weight, the sound of a power before which silence is the only fitting response. Then, with no transition, the choir turns to "Salva me, fons pietatis", save me, fountain of mercy, and the music begins to plead, almost in a whisper. The contrast is devastating and has nothing of the rhetorical trick about it, since what it gives you is the actual experience of the creature before the creator, terror and hope together, the certainty that you are facing something that could destroy you and the desperate hope that it won't.
This music goes through believer and unbeliever alike, because the Requiem works at a level that comes before belief and disbelief, on the body, on the physiological response to sound organised in a certain way. When the Rex Tremendae strikes, the atheist feels what the believer feels. He may read the experience differently and deny it any theological content, but the experience is the same, and philosophy ought to take that more seriously than it usually does.
The Lacrimosa is where Mozart stopped, eight bars in, and in all probability he wrote those bars knowing he was dying. You have to hear them. Words won't do it, but I'll try.
It opens with the strings in a figure that rises and falls, like breathing or like sobbing, and the choir comes in on "Lacrimosa dies illa", that day of tears. The melody is so simple it seems impossible at this point in the work, after all the complexity of the Dies Irae and the Confutatis; it is almost a lullaby for the dead. On that simplicity Mozart builds a harmonic progression that presses forward like something that can't be stopped, growing bar by bar and gathering voices and tension until, in the eighth bar, it breaks off.
It breaks off because Mozart could not go on. Eight bars, then nothing. Süssmayr completed the movement, and what he added is competent, but you can hear the difference the way you can tell a human hand from a well-made prosthesis. Mozart's eight bars have an inevitability the rest lacks, with every note and every chord sounding like the only one possible. You come away feeling that the music was found more than composed, that it had always been there and Mozart simply came across it.
I know this sounds like mysticism. But anyone who has listened closely to the Lacrimosa will recognise the impression, and the musicians who perform it say the same. Something in those eight bars goes beyond what technical analysis can account for. You can take the harmony apart, identify the progression, point out that the homorhythmic choral writing heightens the emotion, and all of it is true and none of it is enough. There is a residue, the thing that separates mastery from genius, still there once the analysis is done.
There is an old philosophical problem about music and meaning. Unlike verbal language, music has no propositional content; it asserts nothing. When Hegel says history is the unfolding of the Spirit, that is a proposition, and it can be true or false. The Lacrimosa is neither, so what is it?
The easy answer is that music expresses emotion. That is the common-sense answer, and it's fine as far as it goes. The Requiem expresses grief very differently from the way a person crying does. It is more built than that, grief organised, if you'll allow a phrase musicologists would find reductive but which gets at something real, because music takes the raw material of emotional experience and gives it form, and the form changes the nature of the experience. When someone dies, the grief has a name attached. The grief of the Lacrimosa comes from knowing that death is a structural fact of the world, that everyone we love will die and there is no fixing it; it is metaphysical grief. And music can articulate that in a way verbal language can't, because language has to pass through abstraction, and something gets lost on the way.
Schopenhauer, who understood music better than most philosophers, held that what music represents is the will itself, the thing in itself, what lies beneath all representations, rather than the ideas. You can take that metaphysics or leave it, but it points at something real, that music reaches a level of experience conceptual language can't get to. Calling music superior to language would be silly; it works in a different register, that's all. Language tells you what to think about death, while music makes you experience something about death that can't be turned into thought without shrinking it.
Mozart's Requiem is the extreme case of this, music about death written by a man who was dying, using the words of a rite humanity has been repeating for centuries to deal with the hardest thing there is to deal with. Those eight bars of the Lacrimosa manage what philosophy can't manage with words. They make you feel death not as a concept but as a presence, something happening now, while you listen, in the space between one note and the next.
I find something theologically meaningful in the fact that the Requiem is unfinished, and I'm aware that loading a biographical accident with theological meaning is a doubtful operation. I'll say it anyway.
Mozart did not finish his requiem mass; death arrived before the music about death was done. Nobody designed the image as a parable, yet it works as one, with the human being trying to understand death and death cutting the attempt short. They never let you finish. If you want to be solemn about it, that is the human condition, something always left unresolved. Wholeness is a fantasy, and what we actually get are fragments and interrupted attempts, eight bars and then silence.
But the eight bars exist, and that counts too. Mozart said something that, two hundred and thirty-some years later, still sounds in churches and concert halls and still has the same effect, a silent recognition that some things lie beyond human comprehension, and that what they call for is prayer, or music, rather than analysis. Perhaps those are the same thing said in different languages.
Süssmayr finished the Requiem, and others have offered completions of their own: Beyer, Druce, Levin. They are all respectable, none of them is Mozart, and that is as it should be, because the unfinished work has its own perfection. It points toward something human art cannot contain, which is the most honest definition of sacred art. Mozart stopped at the eighth bar of the Lacrimosa with the pen still in his hand. It is the most exact gesture a composer can make in the face of death: to begin saying something, and let the silence finish the sentence.