Requiem, K. 626

• Mozart received a commission to write a Requiem Mass setting in the summer of 1791. The work was commissioned by a Count Walsegg-Stuppach for his wife, who had died on February 14 of that year.¹
  • The Count’s identity was supposed to be a secret to Mozart, but Mozart’s Oxford Music Online article observes that Mozart actually had a friend who lived at the Count’s house, so the commissioner’s identity might not have been such a mystery after all. Mozart’s scoring for the Requiem included basset horns, rare instruments that Mozart would not have been likely to use unless he knew his client would have them available. 
• Mozart began work on his Requiem in October of 1791, and it was unfinished at the time of his death on December 5 of that year.²
  • Already in 1792, Viennese newspapers had begun reporting the rumor that writing the Requiem had been a great stress to Mozart which hastened his death. There isn’t much evidence that this was the case.  
  • According to Constanze Mozart, Wolfgang was excited to write a Requiem:  

Mozart “told her of his remarkable request, and at the same time expressed a wish to try his hand at this type of composition, the more so as the higher forms of church music had always appealed to his genius.” 

Constanze Mozart, on Mozart’s attitude toward composing his Requiem, quoted in Franz Xaver Niemetschek’s 1798 biography of Mozart³

• As Mozart was on his deathbed, several friends came to visit and sing through parts of the Requiem, including composer and tenor Benedikt Schack, who created the role of Tamino in The Magic Flute, Mozart’s brother-in-law, violinist Franz de Paula Hofer, and bass Franz Xaver Gerl, who created the role of Sarastro.⁴
• Benedikt Schack’s 1827 obituary contained the following (likely romanticized) recollection of the Requiem reading at Mozart’s deathbed. 

“On the very eve of his death, Mozart had the score of the Requiem brought to his bed, and himself (it was two o’clock in the afternoon) sang the alto part; Schack, the family friend, sang the soprano line, as he had always previously done, Hofer, Mozart’s brother-in-law, took the tenor, Gerl, later a bass singer at the Mannheim Theater, the bass. They were at the first bars of the Lacrimosa when Mozart began to weep bitterly, laid the score on one side, and eleven hours later, at one o’clock in the morning (of 5 December 1791, as is well known), departed this life.”

From the obituary for Benedikt Schack in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 1827.⁵

• Mozart might have received a visit from Antonio Salieri on his deathbed, but as Oxford Music Online puts it, “there is no credible evidence to support the notion that he was poisoned, by Salieri or anyone else.” The diagnosis soon after Mozart’s death was “rheumatic inflammatory fever.”⁶
• The Requiem was completed, at Constanze Mozart’s request, by Mozart’s colleague and friends Franz Xaver Süssmayr. Süssmayr had been Mozart’s composition student, and his copyist for La clemenza di Tito and other projects.⁷

1. Cliff Eisen, and Stanley Sadie, “Mozart, (Johann Chrysostom) Wolfgang Amadeus,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed March 24, 2021,  https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-6002278233.
2. Ibid.
3. Quoted in Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Christoph Wolff and Mary Whittal, Mozart’s Requiem: Historical and Analytical Studies, Documents, Score (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 127. 
6. Cliff Eisen, and Stanley Sadie, “Mozart, (Johann Chrysostom) Wolfgang Amadeus,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed March 24, 2021,  https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-6002278233.
7. Linda Tyler, Caryl Clark, and Hilary Donaldson, “Süssmayr [Süssmayer], Franz Xaver,” Grove Music Online (2001, accessed March 24, 2021,  https://www.oxfordmusiconline.org/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000027151.