Mozart Requiem in d-minor (KV 626)

In the summer of 1791 Mozart was visited by a mysterious messenger. He asks him to compose a requiem for his master. The name of the client must remain unknown. This assignment is not only a welcome source of income but also an opportunity for Mozart to prepare for a return to church music; he was already promised the position of kapellmeister at the cathedral of Vienna.

While the Viennese audience enthusiastically receives his opera Zauberflöte, Mozart becomes ill. To his wife Konstanze, he confides that the requiem might become his own death mass. Imaginative interpreters later claim that Mozart saw the darkly dressed man as the messenger of death. He dies on 5 December. The day before he rehearses his requiem and sings it from his sickbed. But the composition is not finished yet …

Lacrimosa, dies illa, that day full of tears. Those are the words on which Mozart composes his last bars of music. Konstanze, urgently for money, asks Mozart’s student Franz Xaver Süssmayr to complete the requiem. It gives generations of musicians study material: which parts are Mozart’s and which ones of Süssmayr? It gives us the chance to enjoy an undisputed masterpiece.