this blog’s first Mozart Requiem

It was gratifying to sing once again to a full Cathedral for Bristol Choral’s most recent concert. Our first half was a piece I’d never sung before: Handel’s Dettingen Te Deum. I recall this being quite popular on concert programmes in Cambridge, maybe because it is fairly easy to put together including the soloists and sounds impressive. As long as you can get the trumpets of course – the British Sinfonietta’s showed how it’s done.

The second soprano part in this piece gets a certain amount of the infill that is usually associated with alto lines. But there are some highlights, such as the aria-like To thee all angels, which may be intended to compensate for the absence of a soprano soloist.

Few in the choir had encountered the Handel before, but almost everyone had done Mozart’s Requiem. This is the last really major choral work to feature in this blog for the first time. The previous performance of it I sang in, with the Bath Camerata one Good Friday, was just before I started writing the blog, and I don’t think I’ve been to a concert with it in since then. We were told that we should try to erase the interpretations of previous people we’d sung the piece for, and I didn’t find this too hard, not only because of the long time gap but because I think all the performances I’ve sung have been for different people. In particular, I never sang the Requiem for our choir’s previous Director of Music.

Certain passages in this work have acquired associations I can’t shake off. The local hospital had the opening of the Dies Irae on the mixtape which was played to people lying on the slab being measured up for radiotherapy; not really the piece to play to your cancer patients, one might have thought. On a lighter note, the interpretation of the Confutatis by a toy koala is surely definitive; watch this at your own risk! And as I’ve said before I can’t be the only person who cannot sing or hear the end of the Lacrimosa without visualising the closing scene of Amadeus, even if music and film alike are inauthentic.

So how much of the Requiem is Mozart? There are large chunks for which no score in his hand now exists, but was there once more, or was he able to communicate some of his ideas to Süßmayr? Or are we deluding ourselves and everything which is not attested in Mozart’s hand is by Süßmayr in its entirety? Did his proximity to Mozart enable him to raise his game and compose better music than he was normally capable of?

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