Reverence for a requiem

While O’Connor describes himself as “not a religious person now,” the Requiem does strike a deep, inner chord, and for a very good reason. “I grew up in the Catholic church and was an altar boy,” he says. “There’s a wellspring of memories and feelings that are associated with it, and I do feel a connection to the mysticism of the masses of Catholicism.”

The oft-told story of the Requiem’s genesis is that it was commissioned from Mozart by a stranger, an amateur composer who used ghostwriters to create works by more talented composers that he could pass off as his own.

Mozart was already in ill health when he received the 50% deposit from Count Franz von Walsegg to start work on the Requiem, and he died on December 5, 1791, leaving it half finished. Count Walsegg never met Mozart — he worked entirely through emissaries — so Constanze, Mozart’s widow, decided to follow Walsegg’s method and find someone else to complete the score so she could collect the balance due.

Joseph Leopold Eybler, who had helped rehearse Mozart’s Cosí fan Tutte and then conducted some of its performances, worked on several sections. When he backed out of the project, Constanze replaced him with Franz Xaver Süssmayr, one of Mozart’s composition students, who seems to have completed the Requiem in March 1792.

“Even though he didn’t finish it, the Requiem is the peak of Mozart’s sacred writing,” O’Connor says. “He takes very small fragments of melodies, and he manipulates them, and turns them upside down and backwards, and uses them over and over throughout the piece, so all the sections are related.”

Four of the Requiem’s eight movements had been completed in full or in part by Mozart before his death. Süssmayr almost certainly had access to other sketches of music by Mozart that he could have used in completing the work, although he later claimed the Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei were entirely his own.

Süssmayr was a popular composer in the late 18th and early 19th centuries — Beethoven even wrote a set of virtuoso piano variations on a theme from one of his operas — but was overmatched by Mozart’s genius in the task, as any Viennese composer other than Haydn would have been.

Major objections to Süssmayr’s version were voiced as early as 1825 and many alternative completions have been created by musicologists, performers, and composers in the two centuries since then. The Pro Musica performances will use a 1991 edition by Robert Levin.

A Harvard-trained solo pianist and musicologist, Levin was a pioneer in restoring improvisation to the role it had in Classical-era keyboard performances. He became intrigued by the Requiem as an undergraduate and even wrote a fugal conclusion for it using a Mozart fragment that used the text “Amen.”

In 1987, Levin gave a scholarly talk on the different versions of the Requiem, then played his concluding fugue. Helmuth Rilling, longtime artistic director of the Oregon Bach Festival, heard the talk and told Levin he wanted to commission a new version from him for the Mozart bicentennial in 1991.

Levin listed all the reasons why he couldn’t accept the commission, but Rilling eventually wore him down. As he told the Juilliard Journal in 2016, “Finally I thought, ‘It’s got to be easier to complete the Requiem than it is to go on arguing.’”

His work on the Requiem could be called minimally invasive surgery. “I tried to simplify, to clean up the somewhat thick orchestral textures [that Süssmayr favored], for instance, so the choral lines and the solo lines of Mozart were thrown into stronger relief,” he said.

All the sections Mozart worked on ended with a fugue, but not Süssmayr’s contributions. The reason was simple, O’Connor says. “He didn’t know how to write one. The whole structure of the Mass is restored in Levin’s completion of it,” he says. Counterpoint wasn’t much used in music of the time; Mozart essentially taught himself how to write it by studying Bach and Handel.

Mozart used D minor as the Requiem’s home key because of its dark, dramatic qualities. (For the same reason, D minor and D major are the home keys for Don Giovanni.) In addition, he banished three instruments — flutes, oboes, and horns — from the Requiem’s orchestra, further darkening its tonal palette.

He also replaced the pair of clarinets with two basset horns, a deeper-voiced relative of the clarinet. Modern clarinets are often used in performances of the Requiem today (they can play all the notes, they just don’t have the sound Mozart wanted), but Santa Feans will be fortunate in hearing basset horns instead.

The University of New Mexico Music Department owns two of the rare instruments, and Jeffrey Brooks, Pro Musica’s principal clarinet, is a professor in the department who has arranged for their use in the performances. He’ll be joined by Sam McClung, who pulls triple duty as Pro Musica’s second clarinet, music librarian, and marketing manager.

“If you were to compare the clarinets of 250 years ago to those today, it’s almost a completely different instrument in the way that it’s played and its timbre and tonal quality,” Brooks says. “You wouldn’t believe if you heard the comparison.”

They used to be made of boxwood, Brooks says, which is a much lighter material than those used today. “They had a much more subtle sound, more intimate and not as loud,” he says. “They don’t project in the same way a modern instrument does.”

Mozart was a particular fan of the basset horn, in part because it was often played for him by Anton Stadler, a noted Viennese virtuoso. Mozart wrote his Clarinet Quintet and Clarinet Concerto specifically for Stadler, and he included parts for basset horns in his Masonic Funeral Music and the operas The Abduction from the Seraglio, La Clemenza di Tito, and The Magic Flute.

Eighteenth-century composers had to write for the basset horn in a very different way, due to the instrument’s unique aspects. “They had very few keys and mostly open tone holes that you’d have to cover with your fingers,” Brooks says. “That meant you couldn’t play an even-sounding scale the way you can today. One note might be very clear and the one right next to it very muffled.”

In the Requiem, Mozart made use of a particular technique related to the basset horn’s timbre in different registers. “A lot of what Sam and I play is in the mid- to upper-part of the basset horn’s range,” Brooks points out. “I feel like it creates an ethereal, other-worldly quality, kind of a ghostly sound. It also has a very vocal aspect, and Mozart believed that the basset horn was one of the most voice-like of all the instruments in his orchestra.”

Anna Clyne’s “Within Her Arms” opens the program. It’s a 12-minute piece for string orchestra written as a requiem for her mother; the Los Angeles Philharmonic premiered it in 2009.

The composer’s note says simply, “‘Within Her Arms’ is music for my mother, Colleen Clyne, with all my love,” followed by an excerpt from the poem “Message” by Buddhist monk Thích Nhât Hạnh. A section of it reads:

Earth will keep you tight within her arms dear one —

So that tomorrow you will be transformed into flowers —

This flower smiling quietly in this morning field —

This morning you will weep no more dear one —

For we have gone through too deep a night.

“Within Her Arms” received widespread acclaim, with The New Yorker opining “its intertwining voices of lament bring to mind English Renaissance masterpieces of Thomas Tallis and John Dowland,” and San Francisco Classical Voice saying that it “exerted an emotional pull from its opening gestures that steadily intensified through an exquisite performance … this writing felt vital and new, both mournful and filled with life.”

The 44-year-old composer was born in London and grew up near Oxford. While she played the piano and the cello as a child and wrote her first piece of music at age seven, she embarked instead on a literature degree at the University of Edinburgh. A late-college shift back to music meant her first formal lesson in composition took place at age 20.

Conductors and performers admire her work just as much as music critics do. Marin Alsop, principal guest conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, says her compositional versatility “is the mark of real talent, [she’s] someone who can write a long-form piece that is deeply moving and then a right-between-the-eyes barn burner of a showpiece.”

Violinist Jennifer Koh, who has commissioned several pieces from Clyne, told The New York Times, “I do a lot of contemporary music. Sometimes things reach you, and it’s colorful or intricate or structured in an interesting way or the orchestration is wonderful. But the extraordinary thing about Anna’s music is that it is incredibly moving.”