Mozart's Requiem
Heard live only once: in Prague. St. Nicholas Church in the Old Town (if memory serves). Literally: I was transported. I heard it this morning on the radio and remembered (half-remembered) the past. *** The Requiem Mass in D minor ( K. 626) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was composed in Vienna in 1791 and left unfinished at the composer's death on December 5. A completion dated 1792 by Franz Xaver Süssmayr was delivered to Count Franz von Walsegg , who had anonymously commissioned the piece for a requiem mass to commemorate the February 14 anniversary of his wife's death. The autograph manuscript shows the finished and orchestrated introit in Mozart's hand, as well as detailed drafts of the Kyrie and the sequence Dies Irae as far as the first nine bars of "Lacrimosa" , and the offertory . It cannot be shown to what extent Süssmayr may have depended on now lost "scraps of paper" for the remainder; he later claimed the Sanctus and Agnus Dei ...