Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ed. by Michael Ostrzyga (review)

2024; Music Library Association; Volume: 80; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/not.2024.a919065

1534-150X

Erick Arenas,

Musicology and Musical Analysis

Reviewed by: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ed. by Michael Ostrzyga Erick Arenas Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Requiem. Completed and edited by Michael Ostrzyga. Score. Kassel, Bärenreiter, 2022. [Preface, p. IV–XV; score, p. 1–226; crit. report, p. 227–33. ISMN 979-0-006-56919-9. $94.95.] Nearly 230 years after it first captured the attention of musicians and critics, the "traditional" version of Mozart's Mass for the Dead, the Requiem, K. 626, completed by Franz Xaver Süßmayr (1766–1803), continues to stimulate scholarly re-evaluations and debates. Consequently, "the cottage industry of alternative completions," as David Black remarked in 2008, "shows no sign of decline" (Robert D. Levin, et al., "Colloquy: Finishing Mozart's Requiem," Journal of the American Musicological Society 61, no. 3 [Fall 2008]: 598). A major case in point is this new edition of the work from Bärenreiter, which presents an impressive, scholarly new completion by the German composer and conductor Michael Ostrzyga. Like so many previous re-completions of Mozart's Requiem, it draws attention to the potency of the musical ideas contained in Mozart's original manuscript, exposes the challenges and limits of recovering an authoritative sense of the liturgical musical sensibilities of Mozart's age, leaves some concerns to be addressed by a future completion, and introduces ideas that will spur yet further debate. Mozart began work on the Requiem in the autumn of 1791 in response to a commission from a Lower Austrian aristocrat and amateur musician, Count Franz of Walsegg-Stuppach, for the celebration of a Requiem Mass in remembrance of his wife, who had died earlier in the year. Although much of Mozart's attention had recently been focused on the completion and performance of new operatic works, namely Die Zauberflöte (K. 620) and La Clemenza di Tito (K. 621), the composer was well prepared for the task of writing a concerted Requiem. He possessed several years of experience in composing and performing aristocratic liturgical music for the court of Salzburg, as well as other venues. He had returned to active work in this field, with a new focus on the practices and repertoire of Viennese church music, when he was appointed adjunct Kapellmeister at the Cathedral of St. Stephen in Vienna, in May of the same year (David Black, "Mozart and the Practice of Sacred Music, 1781–1791" [PhD diss., Harvard University, 2007], 190). Additionally, since the mid-1780s, he had gained significant new perspectives on contrapuntal technique and sacred choral style through his encounters with earlier works by George Frederic Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach, introduced in Vienna by Baron Gottfried van Swieten. The Requiem would engender some of Mozart's most compelling thematic and textural ideas, but would ultimately go unfinished due to the composer's death on December 5. Of the projected major segments of the work, only the Introitus stood complete. The impressive double-fugal Kyrie lacked only its orchestral embellishment. The Sequentia, from Dies irae through Confutatis, had fully written vocal and basso continuo parts, but only guiding fragments of its orchestration; its concluding Lacrymosa consisted of only the opening eight measures. The Offertorium also had fully written vocal parts and basso continuo with limited orchestral fragments. By all indications, the Sanctus, Agnus Dei, and Communio movements had yet to be composed. Mozart's widow, Constanze, sought to have the Requiem completed soon after his death, probably in order to retain the commission [End Page 576] fee for the work. The task was initially taken up by the then-emerging Viennese composer Joseph Leopold Eybler (1765–1846); however, he soon abandoned the project, leaving behind his own unfinished version. Süßmayr, a sometime student of Mozart who had come to Vienna in 1788, is not known to have been active in church music during the intervening years; however, he had previously gained significant experience in this area as a musician and composer in Kremsmunster (Black, 362). He finished his completion of the Requiem in early 1792, and it was in this form that the work was introduced to the public as Mozart's opus ultimum in performances in Austria and Germany in the 1790s. It was published in 1800 and...