Notes on the Program: Mozart and Memory

By Julia Grella O’Connell, D.M.A., Director of Education and Community Engagement

Any orchestral performance is a shared act of musical remembering, and Mozart’s Requiem is one of the greatest examples. Commissioned by a nobleman hoping to pass off the piece as his own, Mozart was already terminally ill when he began it, and he died at age 35 before it was completed. Finished by his pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr in the version performed today, the Requiem was sung at Mozart’s own funeral in January 1792. It is thus not only weighted with biographical significance – the artist weaving his own death-shroud – but also functions on a universal level, as Mozart uses the ancient form of the Mass for the Dead to call us to remembrance.

This call is at the very heart of the Requiem. In the Recordare – literally a command to remember – the four solo voices beseech Jesus with the kind of intimacy of child to parent, or lover to beloved, to remember the individual soul and his own life’s mission to save it. As the Requiem shifts between anguish and terror, desperation and resignation, pathos and restraint, the Recordare sits at its calm center, a moment in which time seems both to stand still and to flow forward in the cyclical, contrapuntal motion of intertwining strings and voices. Mozart’s choral writing is virtuosic, demanding that singers careen through a dizzying range of textures, tempos, and emotions. But in the Recordare, the chorus falls silent, and the soloists articulate the individual voice of the soul who, in spite of everything, has unshakeable faith in God. Mozart infuses the familiar words of the Mass with profoundly humanistic vocal writing, reminding the listener that the soul, however sinful, has reason to hope.

This call to remember resonates further when we recall that, at the time of Mozart’s death, the world was being plunged into forced forgetfulness. The French Revolution had overturned traditional ways of knowing, including the measuring of time itself; as Mozart was being buried, the Revolutionary government established a new calendar with 1789 as its Year I. The old world was being swept away: first by ideas, and soon by the might of Napoleon’s Grande Armée. 

When Mozart centers the act of remembering at the heart of his Requiem, he is also entreating us, as listeners, to remember the sacred story that tells us who we are. As Patrick Mackie notes in Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces, “the past is not abolished by modern freedoms,” and hence Mozart bids us remember the truths of humankind that continue despite all efforts to sweep them away. May participating in today’s act of musical remembrance leave you with the hope he so profoundly expressed in his last work.