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Mozart's Requiem: Reception, Work, Completion

This monograph (c.95,000 words) is the first to be published by a scholarly press in almost 20 years on Mozart's Requiem, one of the most popular works in the entire western canon. It received the Marjorie Weston Emerson Award from the Mozart Society of America in 2013 for the best book or edition published in 2011 or 2012. The initial stimulus was my single-authored article ‘“Die Ochsen am Berge”: Franz Xaver Süssmayr and the Orchestration of Mozart¹s Requiem K. 626’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 61 (2008), pp. 1-65. This article was then the subject of a c.12,000-word colloquy ‘Finishing Mozart's Requiem’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 61 (2008), pp. 583-608, the longest on a single article in the history of this journal, concluding with my reply (pp. 602-608). The article and colloquy subsequently led to the invitation to present ‘Mozart's Requiem in Early 19th-Century Fiction’ at the Internationaler Musikwissentschaftlicher Kongress, Mozarteum Salzburg (3 October 2010). Mozart's Requiem: Reception, Work, Completion is the first book to give serious scholarly attention to the reception of the legends surrounding the work ­ in literature, fiction, theatre and drama as well as in musical writings ­ alongside criticism, scholarship and performance. It uses prevailing aesthetic and reception-related trends as a springboard for interpreting Mozart's work (as passed down to us in the autograph score), Joseph Eybler and Süssmayr¹s work in 1791-92, and that of the modern completers of the Requiem in the late twentieth century, thereby beginning to loosen the hermeneutic shackles in which Mozart's Requiem traditionally has been held through fixation with issues of authorship. Writing the monograph resulted in a commission (now completed) for a 6,000-word chapter ‘Mozart's Requiem’ in an interactive iBook for iPad, Mozart, edited by Harry Farnham and James Fairclough (London: Pipedreams Media Ltd., forthcoming 2013).

The research for the three reception-related chapters and the chapter on the Requiem completion involved working with a highly diverse range of musical and non-musical sources in English, French and German; many were difficult to access and could only be assembled and interpreted over a lengthy period. The monograph’s theses are multi tiered, combining inter alia: the different receptions of the work in musical, literary and dramatic circles; the importance of instrumentation and instrumental effects in Mozart’s compositional aesthetic and in understanding Süssmayr’s completion; and the enduring ability of the Requiem legend to affect interpretations of the work.