Mozart died on December 5th, 1791, aged thirty-five, while working on a mass for the dead he could not finish. A composer writing music for the dead and dying as he writes it. The kind of symmetry a novelist would discard for being too neat, too obvious, too perfect. But it happened. And the fact that it happened says something about reality that fiction rarely dares to say: that sometimes things mean exactly what they appear to mean.
The Requiem in D minor, K. 626, is Mozart’s last work. It is also his most famous, his most mythologised, his most distorted by legends ranging from the mysterious messenger who commissioned it to the idea that Salieri poisoned him, which is false but which Pushkin turned into drama and Milos Forman into film and which by now is impossible to dislodge from the popular imagination. Beneath all those layers of myth there is a concrete thing: a piece of music that, even incomplete, even finished by other hands, is one of the most overwhelming things a human being ever produced.
I want to talk about that. Not the myth, not the biography, not the circumstances of composition, though some of that will be unavoidable. I want to talk about what the Requiem does. What it says. Why, when it sounds, verbal language becomes insufficient in a way that is not metaphor but direct experience.
First the facts, and even those need handling with care, because the facts of the Requiem are wrapped in two hundred years of embellishment.
What is known for certain is this: an intermediary commissioned a requiem mass from Mozart in the summer of 1791, on behalf of a client who wished to remain anonymous. The client was Count Franz von Walsegg, an aristocratic music amateur who had a habit of commissioning works from professional composers and passing them off as his own. He wanted the requiem to commemorate his wife’s death. Mozart accepted the commission, took an advance, and began working. But 1791 was a year of frantic activity: he was composing The Magic Flute, La clemenza di Tito, the Clarinet Concerto. The Requiem moved slowly. In November he fell ill. In December he died. The work was left unfinished.
What Mozart left completed: the Introitus, fully orchestrated. The Kyrie, complete. Of the Sequentia, the central and most dramatic section of a requiem, he left the vocal parts and continuo for the Dies Irae, Tuba Mirum, Rex Tremendae, Recordare, and Confutatis, with partial orchestral indications. Of the Lacrimosa he left eight bars. Of the Offertory, voices and continuo. Of the Sanctus, Benedictus, Agnus Dei, and Communio he left nothing, or at least nothing that survived.
Constanze, his widow, needed the commission money. She asked Franz Xaver Süssmayr, a pupil of Mozart’s, to complete the work. Süssmayr did so, with results that musicologists have been debating ever since. The sections Mozart left orchestrated are indisputably Mozart. Those Süssmayr completed from Mozart’s sketches are a grey area. Those Süssmayr composed from scratch, the Sanctus and Benedictus above all, are Süssmayr trying to sound like Mozart, which is rather like a house painter trying to finish a Vermeer: you can tell.
None of this matters as much as it seems. What matters is what it sounds like.
The Introitus
The first notes of the Requiem are the darkest Mozart ever wrote. The basset horns, a kind of low-pitched clarinet Mozart loved and rarely used outside this work, open with a descending figure in D minor that immediately establishes a colour unlike anything else in his catalogue. Mozart wrote in D minor only a handful of times. The Piano Concerto No. 20 is the best-known example, and there D minor is dramatic, tense, nearly operatic. In the Requiem, D minor is something else. It is weight. It is gravity. The music moving downward, as though sound itself were being pulled towards the earth.
When the choir enters, singing “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine,” grant them eternal rest, Lord, what you hear is not a prayer in the conventional sense. It is not a polite request addressed to a benevolent God. It is something more ambiguous, denser. It is the human voice confronting the fact of death and searching for words, and finding that the words of the rite, the words the Church has been repeating for centuries, are at once insufficient and the only thing there is.
Mozart was a Catholic. This is quickly said and slowly understood. He was not devout in the conventional sense; his letters show someone with a complicated relationship to religious institutions, someone who was a Freemason, who kept Enlightenment company, who did not fit easily into the piety of his time. But he was Catholic in a deeper sense: the liturgy was in his body, in his ear, in the very structure of his musical thinking. When he wrote the Requiem he was not illustrating a religious text. He was inhabiting it. There is a difference.
The Dies Irae and the Sublime
The Sequentia opens with the Dies Irae, the most violent text in the Catholic liturgy. Day of wrath, that day, when heaven and earth shall dissolve in ashes. A description of the Last Judgement written in the thirteenth century, and Mozart sets it to music that sounds like what it describes: an explosion of orchestral and choral fury without precedent in eighteenth-century sacred music.
You have to understand how unusual this is coming from Mozart. Mozart is the composer of balance, proportion, grace. Even at his most dramatic, as in Don Giovanni, he maintains a formal control that never loses its elegance. The Dies Irae of the Requiem sounds as though that control has broken. Not technically, because the writing is flawless. But emotionally. There is something unleashed in it, something that exceeds the liturgical function of the piece and enters the territory of what Burke and Kant called the sublime: the experience of something so vast the mind cannot contain it and the response is a mixture of terror and fascination.
The sublime is an aesthetic category that modernity has largely misplaced. Today art aspires to beauty, to provocation, to impact, to social relevance. It rarely aspires to the sublime, which requires a disposition towards the transcendent that contemporary culture does not encourage. Mozart’s Dies Irae is sublime in the strictest sense: music that confronts the listener with something that exceeds him, that forces him to acknowledge the existence of forces he does not control, that puts him in his place with a violence that is at once terrifying and liberating.
The Rex Tremendae, which follows shortly after, does something similar but with even greater economy. The choir sings “Rex tremendae majestatis,” king of tremendous majesty, and the strings strike descending chords that sound like a hammer on an anvil. Pure musical authority. There is no melody in any conventional sense. There is weight. There is mass. There is the sonic representation of a power before which the only appropriate response is silence. And then, without transition, the choir shifts to “Salva me, fons pietatis,” save me, fount of mercy, and the music turns supplicant, fragile, nearly whispered. The contrast is devastating because it is not rhetorical. It is not an effect. It is the actual experience of the creature before the creator: terror and hope at the same time, the certainty that you stand before something that could destroy you and the desperate hope that it won’t.
You do not need to believe in God to feel this. That is what is remarkable. The Requiem operates at a level that precedes both belief and unbelief. It operates at the level of the body, of vibration, of the physiological response to sound organised in a certain way. When the Rex Tremendae strikes, the atheist feels what the believer feels. He may interpret the experience differently, may deny it theological content, but the experience is the same. And that says something about music that philosophy ought to take more seriously.
The Eight Bars
The Lacrimosa is the movement where Mozart stopped. Eight bars. Eight bars written in all probability by a man who knew he was dying.
You have to hear them. Words will not be enough, but I’ll try.
The Lacrimosa opens with the strings tracing a figure that rises and falls, like a breath or like a sob, and the choir enters singing “Lacrimosa dies illa,” that day of tears. The melody is of a simplicity that seems impossible at this stage of the work, after all the complexity of the Dies Irae and the Confutatis. It is almost a lullaby. Almost a lullaby for the dead. And over that simplicity Mozart builds a harmonic progression that moves forward with the inevitability of something that cannot be stopped, growing with every bar, accumulating voices and tension and weight until, at the eighth bar, it breaks off.
It breaks off because Mozart could not go on. That is what there is. Eight bars and then nothing. Süssmayr completed the movement, and what he added is competent, but you can feel the difference the way you’d feel the difference between a human hand and a well-made prosthesis. Mozart’s eight bars have an inevitability that what follows does not. Every note sounds as though it could not have been another. Every chord is the only one possible. There is a sense of necessity, as though the music were not composed but discovered, as though it had always been there and Mozart had simply found it.
I know this sounds like mysticism. But it is an impression anyone who has listened to the Lacrimosa with attention will recognise, and one that musicians who perform it confirm. There is something in those eight bars that exceeds what technical analysis can account for. You can break down the harmony, identify the progression, note that the use of homorhythmic choral writing creates a texture that heightens emotion. All of that is true and all of it is insufficient. There is a residue, something left over after the analysis is done, and that residue is what separates mastery from genius.
What Music Says and Words Cannot
There is an old philosophical problem about music and meaning. Music, unlike verbal language, has no propositional content. It asserts nothing. Describes nothing. Argues nothing. When Hegel says that history is the unfolding of Spirit, that is a proposition that can be true or false. When Mozart writes the Lacrimosa, it is neither true nor false. It is something else. But what?
The easy answer is that music expresses emotion. It is the common-sense answer and it is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The Requiem does not express sadness in the same way that a person crying expresses sadness. It is not a direct manifestation of an emotional state. It is something more elaborate, more constructed, more intentional. It is organised sadness, to put it in a way musicologists would find reductive but that I think captures something real: music takes the raw material of emotional experience and gives it form, and the form changes the nature of the experience. The sadness of the Lacrimosa is not the sadness you feel when someone you know dies. It is the sadness of knowing that death exists as a structural fact of the world, that everyone we love will die, that we ourselves will die, and that nothing can be done about it. It is metaphysical sadness, not personal. And music can articulate that in a way verbal language cannot, because verbal language must pass through the proposition, the concept, the abstraction, and in that passage something is lost.
Schopenhauer, who understood music better than most philosophers, said that music does not represent ideas but the will itself, the thing-in-itself, what lies beneath all representations. It is a metaphysical formulation one may accept or not, but it points at something real: music accesses a level of experience that conceptual language does not reach. Not because it is superior to language, which would be foolish, but because it operates in a different register. Language tells you what to think about death. Music makes you experience something about death that cannot be translated into thought without diminishing it.
Mozart’s Requiem is the extreme case of this. Music written about death by someone who was dying, using the words of a rite that humanity has been repeating for centuries to process the hardest thing there is to process. And what it achieves, what those eight bars of the Lacrimosa achieve, is something that neither the Bible, nor Plato, nor Shakespeare, nor Heidegger achieved with words: making you feel death not as a concept but as a presence. Not as something that will happen but as something happening now, while you listen, in the space between one note and the next.
The Incomplete Work
There is something I find theologically significant in the fact that the Requiem is unfinished, and I say this aware that assigning theological meaning to a biographical accident is a dubious operation. But I’ll say it anyway.
Mozart did not finish his mass for the dead. Death arrived before the music about death could be completed. It is an image that works as parable without anyone having designed it as one: the human being trying to comprehend death and death interrupting the attempt. You don’t get to finish. You never get to finish. That is the human condition, if you want to be solemn about it: there is always something left unsaid, undone, unresolved. Completeness is a fantasy. What there is are fragments, sketches, interrupted attempts. Eight bars and then silence.
But the eight bars exist. That matters too. It is not that Mozart said nothing. He said something that two hundred and thirty-odd years later still sounds in churches, in concert halls, in the earphones of people riding the subway, and that still produces the same effect: the quiet recognition that there are things beyond our capacity to understand and that the proper response to this is not analysis but something closer to awe, or to prayer, or to music, which may be different forms of the same thing.
Süssmayr finished the Requiem. Others have offered their own completed versions: Beyer, Druce, Levin. All are respectable. None is Mozart. And that is as it should be. The incomplete work has its own perfection, the perfection of something that points towards what it cannot reach, which is, if you think about it, the most honest definition of religious art. You don’t get there. You never get there. But you point in the direction, and in the pointing there is something worth more than the arrival.