Posted on 03/10/2006 7:27:15 AM PST by sitetest
HOW did an unknown version of Mozart's unfinished Requiem find its way into the archives of a former cathedral in Brazil? That's the question facing the musical world this week, following the release today of a new recording of the Requiem on the specialist K617 French label, in a version written 30 years after Mozart's death by an Austrian-born composer, Johann Sigismund Neukomm. It has lain forgotten in a Rio de Janeiro vault for nearly 200 years.
The answer to the basic question is simple: we know Neukomm had an unquenchable thirst for travel. He was born in Salzburg in 1778, in a house opposite the Mozart family home. He received his first composition lessons there from Michael Haydn, brother of Joseph, and who, through a close friendship, exerted significant influence on shaping Mozart's own sacred music style, including that of the Requiem. Neukomm took himself to Vienna, armed with a letter of introduction to Joseph Haydn. He turned out to be an exceptionally skilled assimilator of Haydn's style, to the extent that the old master entrusted his keen pupil with preparing arrangements of his own works.
His travels continued, first to St Petersburg in 1801, then on a stream of nomadic adventures that centred on Paris. In 1816, he found himself aboard the French frigate Hermione, as part of a diplomatic mission to Brazil.
In Rio, he got to know Brazil's best-known composer of the day, Nunes Garcia, who was in charge of music at the city's cathedral. Garcia was responsible for mounting the annual St Cecilia's Day requiem mass in honour of musicians who had died during the year. It was for one of these, around 1820, that Neukomm drew on his skills and composed a completely new ending to Mozart's Requiem. Just as he had emulated the style of Haydn when working in Vienna, Neukomm set his mind to composing in the style of Mozart a concluding setting of the Libera me, a crucial part of the Requiem service, which Mozart had either not begun work on when he died, or had simply no intention of including in the first place.
Neukomm's addendum is the focus of the new French CD issue, on which Jean-Claude Malgoire directs the musicians of Le Chœur Kantorei de Saarlouis and La Grande Ecurie et la Chambre du Roy. Does it add anything to our understanding of a work that has frustrated musicologists for more than two centuries?
Musically, the Libera me is craftily concocted, but not entirely convincing. It's not helped in this recording by a performance that is inconsistent and occasionally lacklustre. What we witness is a new and robust finale that is part jigsaw, part guesswork, the latter based on Neukomm's first-hand knowledge of Mozart's style and of earlier official attempts to create a performing edition.
He has called on the dark musical shades of Don Giovanni, and pieced within that chunks of earlier themes which, in their brief coming and going, tend to make the movement resemble the fast-knitted reprise finale of a West End musical. That's its weakness. But its existence does add colour to the alluring mystery of the Requiem, a work which has fired numerous fantastical theories and conspiracies. The plain facts are that it was anonymously commissioned at a high fee by Count Walsegg-Stuppach, who had a habit of stealing composers' music and passing it off as his own.
Mozart, simultaneously busy on two operas, died without completing the Requiem. In the aftermath, his widow Constanze sought to have the work completed - first asking Joseph Eybler, then Mozart's pupil and trusted amanuensis Franz Sussmayr, whose own compositional attainment was modest, but whose loyalty to his teacher was unquestionable. It was his version that was ultimately published; her intervention ensured Mozart's authorship was protected.
There are countless interpretations of the completion by Sussmayr, from slow-moving, indulgent interpretations - by such late Romantic giants as Herbert von Karajan, - to the leaner, more spirited 1990s approach of Sir John Eliot Gardiner's Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, newly available this month on DVD from Philips. There have since been revisionist reconstructions, the most convincing by the brilliant American scholar, Robert Levin, forcing us to shake off preconceptions of the familiar edition and listen with fresh ears to new considerations based on newly available source material.
But scholarship has probably gone as far as it can go: Mozart did not live to complete the Requiem. Contemporary reports, and Sussmayr's testimonies, suggest Mozart "played and sang" the completed portions with his pupil before he died. There's nothing more to go on. He died at bar eight of the beautiful Lacrimosa, leaving outline sketches and anecdotal instructions beyond that. The musical picture is as complete as it can be.
So what does the emergence of the Brazil Requiem tell us? That in the wake of Mozart's death, and due to the committed efforts and loyalty of his widow and close collaborators, his music became more popular than ever, even his last unfinished utterance. Neukomm created his ending for the best of reasons. It's another piece in the Requiem jigsaw. And our appreciation of Mozart, if not his music, is all the richer for it.
• Neukomm's version of Mozart's Requiem is available on Harmonia Mundi, K617180. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra closes its current season with the Sussmayr version in May.
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I will have to buy that.
I recently puchased Hanson's Elegy In Memory Of Serge Koussevitsky.
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Another version of Mozart's Requiem? Cooooool. Thanks sitetest!
Thanks - very interesting.
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I would like to be on this ping list.
Dear Diva,
Will do!
Thanks,
sitetest
Thanks for the ping. Fascinating article.
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