h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Mozart Requiem - Reconstruction

Posted Aug 16, 2000

The Requiem was the last piece that M wrote, and he left it incomplete.
Some sections he dictated to friends, rather than wrote himself.
Others he only sketched.
After his death, several contemporaries added contributions to complete the work.
In the 1800s, Schulmeyer reviewed the score, and produced what was regarded as the definitive version.
This is the one usually performed today.

Last night, Robert Levin (Head of Harvard Music School) ran a small seminar in which he attempted
to get to an authentic version of the Requiem. I found it a great experience.
Instead of looking at it along a timeline (see above), he looked at it in terms of degrees of authenticity.
He started by stripping the score back to leave only those parts for which autograph manuscripts
(in M's own writing) exist. Then he added parts sketched in M's hand.
Finally, he had trawled through M's jottings (he would write down a couple of bars from one idea,
then some from another ... on scraps of paper). This produced a small amount of "new" material.
Particularly, one item was 5 bars of an "Amen" in D minor - valid 'cos M only wrote one Requiem (it's in D minor).

Then he looked at sections that were manuscript, but someone else's handwriting. He applied the rules
of style that M adhered to. This was fascinating
- he identified a long section which had never been questioned before,
and pointed out sequences of parallel fifths in the inner parts - something M hated.
So this (and many other scripts) were declared not authentic, and were binned.

This left material not in M's hand, but in M's style, so which may have been dictated. This material was
carefully re-introduced into the score.

We scraped together a small group of student musicians and singers, and gave it a go. Great!
Only trouble is, there's no recording of this version - yet.

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Latest reply: Aug 16, 2000