Mozart & the Witness of the Past
On November 1, many churches will celebrate All Saints Day, and some, no doubt, will mark the occasion by performing a musical requiem. As many readers may already know, a requiem is a special eucharistic service in which the church offers praise to God for the life of a departed Christian (or Christians) and prays for the eternal rest of that person’s soul. The traditional requiem service has its own specially appointed liturgical text, and musical settings of that text abound. It is a genre of musical composition that has attracted some of the greatest composers of the classical music tradition. If you want to strike up a conversation with a classical music buff, just ask him which is his favorite requiem: Fauré’s? Verdi’s? Brahms’s? Dvořák’s? Duruflé’s?
Mozart’s Requiem would rank high on almost anyone’s list. Many of its individual movements belong in Mozart’s “hit parade,” such as the harrowing “Lacrimosa” or the ferocious “Confutatis” (both dramatically depicted in the 1984 film, Amadeus). The originality and unique genius of the whole work are incontestable. But I would like to focus on another aspect of the music entirely: its debt to the past.
From Handel & Before
The Requiem is indebted to Handel, for one thing. Just three years before composing his Requiem, Mozart made it his special project to adapt Handel’s Messiah, then just 47 years old, bringing it “up to date” and scoring it for a modern orchestra. This gave Mozart an opportunity to study Handel’s composition techniques very closely and even to borrow some of them for himself.
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Christopher Hoyt is an Anglican organist/choirmaster, and teaches Sacred Music at Cranmer Theological House in Dallas. He was general editor of the hymnal, The Book of Common Praise/Magnify the Lord (2017) and is a composer of hymns and other church music (hoytcomposer.com).
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