One of the classical treats of the Christmas season is a series of performances of Mozart's tremendous Requiem.
The Requiem is cloaked by mystery, not in the least by the latest layer added in recent years by Peter Shaffer's play "Amadeus," which focuses on Mozart through the eyes of jealous rival composer Salieri.
The play is the shrewd dramatic creation of a fine playwright --but it is not history. However, the pseudo-documentary impression of its popular screen version has permanently disfigured the historical Mozart for the video generation.
Mozart was neither poisoned nor systematically destroyed by Antonio Salieri, who died in 1825. Pushkin, artistically seizing upon a what if, published his "Mozart and Salieri" in 1831, and this bite-size verse tragedy in turn inspired Shaffer a century and a half later.
Save any disappointment you might feel that "Amadeus" the movie is not factual, the true story of Mozart's Requiem is stranger than any fiction.
Vienna found Mozart fashionable for a day, and then turned back to its true vocation, frivolity, showering attentions on mediocre composers more to its taste.
"The Marriage of Figaro" and "Don Giovanni," perhaps Mozart's greatest operas, were premiered in Prague with tremendous success. The latter opera was indifferently received in Vienna, in spite of Haydn on that occasion pronouncing Mozart the greatest of all living composers.
Mozart did die in poverty, in 1791. But this was not because his income for the years preceding was uniformly negligible; rather, it was largely because when money did come in he was not as thrifty as would befit a husband and a father.
At the end of 1787 Mozart had at last been given a steady post, as Composer of the Imperial and Royal Chamber with a salary of 800 florins (Gluck had received 2,000 for the same position). The following year he spent looking for work outside Vienna, accepting such mechanical tasks as the re-orchestration of Handel's "Messiah" and "Acis and Galatea."
But the strangest job he ever accepted was his Requiem.
A certain Count Walsegg desired a reputation as a composer. His wife had died, and he wished to be known as having written a Requiem for her. He commissioned Mozart to write one, leaving the composer to fix the price, some 200 ducats. Walsegg paid in advance immediately, promising to pay more on the piece's completion.
Mozart then received a commission from Prague to write an opera for the coronation of the emperor as King of Bohemia. Mozart was on the point of entering the carriage for Prague when a representative of the Count appeared, reminding Mozart of his promise. The composer apologized, and promised to attend to the Requiem as soon as he returned to Vienna.
Once back from Prague, Mozart's health began to decline seriously. As a boy he had been paraded around Europe by his father Leopold as a child prodigy, undermining his health. Struggles to establish himself as an adult composer further strained his constitution.
Nonetheless, back in Vienna he worked as assiduously as he could on the Requiem, seized with the morbid fancy that he was writing it for himself. Indeed his illness increased so menacingly that his physician forbade him to write, and ordered the score to be kept from him.
A transient improvement caused this injunction to be relaxed, and Mozart never again allowed his thoughts to wander from the Requiem. His pupil Suessmayer was continually at his side, and Mozart anxiously detailed to Suessmayer the effects he designed throughout the composition.
In December 1791 Mozart died. His physician cited an accumulation of water on the brain as the cause. Whatever the reason, the Requiem remained incomplete.
The task of finishing it was given first to Joseph Eybler, a composer and staunch friend of Mozart and his family. Finding himself out of his musical depth, Eybler passed the task on to Suessmayer, who ultimately gave the completed score, partly in Mozart's hand and partly in his own, to Constanze, Mozart's widow. Suessmayer forwarded another copy to Count Walsegg.
Learning that Constanze Mozart had been left in financial distress, the emperor gave her a pension for life, and granted her the use of the court opera-house for a benefit concert, at which the Requiem was performed, billed as Mozart's last composition.
Walsegg's pretensions to its authorship were thus promptly destroyed. The Count took no legal action against the widow for her breach of contract until the work was printed. He then desisted at the solicitation of Baron von Nissen (Constanze's second husband).
But when in 1799 the publishers Breitkopf and Haertel printed the Requiem, disputes of another kind arose -- concerning its authenticity.
Suessmayer wrote a letter to the newspapers in 1801, declaring that he was the author of those portions of the manuscript which were in his handwriting. However, one of the results of Suessmayer's extended study under Mozart, during which he received daily advice from the latter for more than a year, was that their handwriting was remarkably similar, so much so that even a competent judge might confuse them.
In 1825 (the year of Salieri's death) Gottfried Weber made Suessmayer's letter of 1801 the groundwork of an assumption that Mozart's claim to the Requiem was entirely spurious. This sparked a heated controversy engaging the chief critics of the day.
Even that was not the Requiem's last contemporary scandal. On Salieri's death, Mozart's friend Eybler was appointed as kapellmeister (court conductor) to the Austrian court. In 1833 Eybler had a stroke and died while conducting a performance of -- Mozart's Requiem.