The Requiem was not only one of Mozart's most inspired works, it was one of his last. It was commissioned in the summer of 1791 to memorialize the deceased wife of Count Walsegg-Stuppach, an amateur musician who was in the habit of ordering works from composers and presenting them as his own compositions. But his dubious patronage arrived only weeks before the rapid decline in Mozart's health that would end in the composer's death by the year's end. At the invitation of Mozart's widow, one of the master's pupils worked from oral instructions and sketches to finish the nearly completed work. In the centuries since, Mozart's Requiem has come to be embraced as a masterpiece of vocal composition. One of the most recorded and performed standards of the repertoire, here reprinted in an authoritative edition, it combines the voices of orchestra, chorus, and soloists into a deeply moving, elegiac work of great intensity.
Author
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 - 1791) was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over six hundred works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music. He is among the most enduringly popular of classical composers. Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood in Salzburg. Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty; at seventeen he was engaged as a court musician in Salzburg, but grew restless and traveled in search of a better position, always composing abundantly. Visiting Vienna in 1781 he was dismissed from his Salzburg position and chose to stay in the capital, where over the rest of life he achieved fame but little financial security. The final years in Vienna yielded many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas, and the Requiem. The circumstances of his early death have been much mythologized. He was survived by his wife Constanze and two sons. Mozart always learned voraciously from others, and developed a brilliance and maturity of style that encompassed the light and graceful along with the dark and passionate—the whole informed by a vision of humanity "redeemed through art, forgiven, and reconciled with nature and the absolute". His influence on all subsequent Western art music is profound. Beethoven wrote his own early compositions in the shadow of Mozart, of whom Joseph Haydn wrote that "posterity will not see such a talent again in 100 years".
