Requiem

Overview

On paper, this program, with its Songs on the Death of Children and Requiem Mass, appears all about death. It’s not just the pieces, but the composers, too, whose legacies are shaded by mortality. Both died young—Mozart at just 35 and Mahler at 51. Mozart’s death sparked a rash of speculation and rumor before his body even touched the soil; for Mahler, mortality became a ghost that persistently haunted him.

Mahler’s obsession with death is understandable considering the number of losses he suffered in his life. Eight of his thirteen siblings died in childhood, including his favorite brother, Ernst, which hit him particularly hard. He later lost a child of his own, just days before being diagnosed with the heart condition that would eventually kill him. He spent much of his life dogged by the feeling that he was doomed, and an obsessive existentialism lurks throughout his body of work.

Mozart, however, saw death a little differently. He was a Freemason, which carried with it an embrace of our unavoidable mortality. The Masons believe that death is our truest friend, rendering all people equal and, perhaps most importantly, reminding us that our time is finite.

Despite his apparent morosity, Mahler’s music is full of redemption. Moments of beauty, joy, and triumph always peek through the darkness. Mozart, an opera composer at heart, embraced the full spectrum of human emotion and drama.

Both found solace and redemption in beauty, love, and above all, music. The arc that unites all the works on this program is that journey from darkness to light—the acceptance found in the end of Kindertotenlieder, the love in the “Adagietto,” and the redemption of eternal rest that defines a Requiem Mass.

Perhaps the best summation of this program comes from a guiding principle of Freemasonry: Memento Mori—remember, you must die. The phrase is not a warning but an invitation. Remember, you must die… and so, you must live.

One last note of interest: Mozart’s music had an enormous impact on generations of composers to come, but few loved him as much as Mahler, whose last words are widely accepted to be, “Mozart, Mozart.”

“Adagietto” from Symphony No. 5 (1901-1902)
Run Time: Approx. 11 minutes

Kindertotenlieder (1901-1904)
Run Time: Approx. 28 minutes

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)

“The sole reward that I ask for my works: to be heard and understood” – Gustav Mahler in a letter to Richard Strauss

For this note, I’m going to do something unusual and lump these two works together. Yes, they are distinct pieces, but Kindertotenlieder sandwiches the Fifth Symphony in timeframe, and both works stem from an important set of overlapping events in the composer’s life.

In the years between 1901 and 1904, Mahler faced a veritable tsunami of major life events. It began with a serious illness that nearly killed him, prompting him to add his own to the growing list of mortalities he fretted over. Soon after, he met Alma Schindler, the force of nature he would marry after just four months. In 1902, Alma gave birth to their first child, Maria Anna. Two years later, they welcomed their second daughter, Anna Justine.

Mahler began working on Kindertotenlieder in 1901, before he and Alma had even met. The deaths of his eight siblings had clung to him, but he found kinship in a set of texts by his favorite poet, Friederich Rückert, whose Kindertotenlieder (1834) were written in reaction to the deaths of his own two children. Rückert had never intended to publish the poems, 428 in all, treating them more like diary entries chronicling his grief. Without that literary varnish, they are strikingly raw and honest, at times approaching manic outbursts. It’s easy to see why Mahler was so drawn to them; emotional ferocity was his calling card as well.

In all, Mahler selected just five of the poems to set, but, preoccupied with conducting engagements, his whirlwind courtship with Alma, and the composition of his Fifth Symphony, he put the work aside after completing three songs.

Symphony No. 5, “Adagietto”

If Kindertotenlieder had come as a response to the death of his siblings, the Fifth Symphony fixates inwardly on his own mortality. A reaction to his recent brush with death, the piece unfolds in five movements, journeying from an ominous funeral march (tellingly derived from the famous fate theme from Beethoven’s Fifth), through a violent purgatory, allusions to his youth and Jewish heritage, and finally arriving at a great triumph of the human spirit. Along the way, he pauses for a wistful “Adagietto,” the movement we included on this program.

Though it’s often performed as a standalone work, the “Adagietto” reaches its full effect when it follows the intensity of the Symphony’s first three tumultuous movements, like the sun finally peeking through at the end of a storm. Mahler once remarked that a symphony should be a whole world. The world that precedes the “Adagietto” is one of sadness, terror, nostalgia for simpler days, and anger that those days are gone. And then a glimmer of hope. Here, Mahler allows the winds, brass, and percussion—who, to this point, have been deep in the trenches—to lay down their arms and take rest as the strings and harp perform a wistful declaration for his new wife. Mahler was in love, and the music displays an innocence not often heard in his music.

Return to Kindertotenlieder

Two years later, just a few weeks after the birth of Anna Justine, Mahler, constantly agonizing over the health of his children, returned to work on Kindertotenlieder. Alma was furious. She could not understand why, upon the birth of a child, he could engage himself with such material. She thought it a bad omen.

But Mahler felt he had to write the songs, even though he knew how difficult they would be to hear. A lifelong friend later recalled that “he felt sorry he had to write them and he pitied the world that would one day have to hear them, so terribly sad was their content.”

Sad as they may be, conductor Leonard Bernstein and baritone Thomas Hampson felt strongly that the songs should not be morose. Hampson recalled discussing this at length while making their landmark 1989 recording of the cycle with the Vienna Philharmonic. “Every poem he wrote,” Hampson says, “all 428 of them, was a cathartic process to get off and out of this catatonic grief of loss, and find some reason in it.”

Reason was all Mahler ever wanted. “Why have you lived?” he wrote. “Why have you suffered? Is it all some huge, awful joke? We have to answer these questions somehow if we are to go on living—indeed, even if we are only to go on dying!”

Rückert and Mahler’s catharsis touches on many familiar aspects of grief. The first movement expresses the loneliness and anger that comes from living in a world that dares to go on as if nothing happened.

 Now the sun prepares to rise as brightly,
As though no misfortune had befallen in the night!

Hampson particularly noted the use of the word “allgemein” to describe the sun shining. “Allgemein,” he said, “means without reservation or impedance. In other words, there’s an audacity that the sun would come up on another day that has seen a night of such grief. And there’s anger in that line.”

In the second song, Rückert expresses the shock of being blindsided by misfortune. Mahler illustrates this with rising figures that culminate on dissonant chords—little twists of the knife. In the third song, Rückert expresses the constant grief of expecting to see his children in their usual places, in the most mundane moments. This music is perhaps the darkest of the set, expressing a constant, unrelenting sadness. It plods along, the plucked strings hinting at a funeral procession, the woodwinds softly heaving, as if at any point it may no longer be able to go on.

When your dear mother
Comes in through the door
With the flickering Candle
I always think
You are coming too
Stealing in behind her
As you used

The fourth song is full of hope, not for the future, but rather for the possibility that this was all just a bad dream. Here, Rückert muses that the children have just gone out for a walk, and will return at any moment. In his setting, Mahler places his upward lilting melody against alternating major and minor modes, the moments of levity so fragile in their brevity.

The fifth movement begins as a storm; finally, we have arrived at anger. How could this have happened? If he had been able, he would have protected them! “In this weather, this raging storm,” Rückert cries, “I’d never have let the children out. But they were carried from the house, I had no say in the matter.” The orchestra quakes and howls as the singer spits and wails.

But no storm can go on forever, and when his rage is finally spent, Rückert finds solace.. Mahler lays the orchestra down to sleep, soothed by gentle strums of the harp and tender lullabies in the winds, perhaps finally putting his own siblings to rest along with it.

In this weather, this howling gale, this raging storm
They rest, as if in their mother’s house.
Frightened by no storm
Protected by God’s hand,
They rest, as if in their mother’s house.

Three years after the premiere of Kindertotenlieder, Mahler lost his eldest child, Maria Anna, to scarlet fever, the same illness that killed Rückert’s children. It would be the first in another string of cataclysmic events for the composer, reigniting the questions that never strayed far from his mind. “Why do we live? Why do we suffer?” Though these quandaries constantly wrestle for purchase in his music, they never win out in the end. It often seems to me that the more he suffered, the more insistently triumphant his music became.

“When I hear music,” he wrote to conductor Bruno Walter in 1909, “I hear quite definite answers to all my questions, and am completely clear and sure. Or rather, I feel quite clearly that they are not questions at all.”

Requiem in D Minor, K. 626 (1791)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Run Time: Approx. 50 minutes

“As an artist Mozart lived in beauty, and he ended in beauty.” – Jan Swafford

It’s a delicious story: an ailing and near-destitute composer is commissioned for a requiem mass by a mysterious nameless patron. He begins to work obsessively, thinking only of the money. As his health deteriorates, he begins to suspect he’s been poisoned. He sleeps too little and drinks too much. Soon, he’s on his deathbed, working furiously, but he’s unable to complete the Requiem. The great composer dies nestled in the scattered, still-wet pages of his unfinished Mass for the Dead. Afterward, he’s tossed into an unmarked pauper’s grave, unmourned and uncelebrated. Not even Shakespeare could write it better than that.

The trouble is, most of this is invented, or at least strongly contested. Here’s the truth, as far as we know it today:

Mozart indeed spent many years in financial discomfort, but towards the end of his life, he was doing alright. His final opera, The Magic Flute, was enjoying a good run in Prague, and he was on the cusp of an appointment to a plum Kapellmeister position. He would have a salary and musicians at his disposal after a lifetime as a freelancer. Things were looking up.

The commission for the Requiem did indeed come from an anonymous source, but today we know the patron to be Count Franz von Walsegg, who sought the work for the death of his young wife. His anonymity was most likely an attempt to pass the work off as his own among his friends.

Mozart’s wife, Constanze, asserted that he never learned the name of the mystery patron, but that seems unlikely since Mozart and the Count had many friends in common. Constanze was in fact the originator of many falsifications around Mozart’s life, including the claim over his supposed poisoning. This wasn’t malicious on her part, but practical. As a young widow with two children, her life now depended on the continued value of his music. All press is good press when you need money.

Though Mozart was, at this time, often working to the point of exhaustion, he was in reasonably good health when he began the Requiem. He worked on it for a short period before pausing to write the Little Masonic Cantata, but returned quickly. Letters to Constanze, who was convalescing from a brief illness, show considerable excitement and good spirits, but sometime after returning to the Requiem, he indeed fell ill. He likely thought nothing of it at first—he had been plagued by poor health all his life—but soon it became clear that this was more serious. Doctors were summoned, and, as we now know, that may have been the worst thing that could have happened. They bled him profusely and subjected him to all manner of toxic tinctures. His death was slow, and likely very painful, but—and this is where the stories get it right—he kept working to the very end.

What did he manage to complete?

Written entirely by Mozart:

I. Introitus

Complete vocal parts and sketches of orchestration written by Mozart:

II. Tuba mirum
III. Sequence (except No. 6)
IV. Offertory

Only the first eight measures completed by Mozart:

III. Sequence – No. 6, Lacrimosa

Written entirely by Süssmayr:

V. Sanctus
VI. Benedictus
VII. Agnus Dei
VIII. Communion. Lux aeterna

Who finished the Requiem?

As the reality of his illness became more clear, Mozart summoned his student, Franz Xaver Süssmayr, and began instructing him on how to finish the piece. Mozart’s sister-in-law, Sophie, recalled arriving at his bedside to find pages of the Requiem scattered across the sheets, along with dozens of little notes on how it should be completed. Though his exact last words are disputed, Sophie also reported the final sound he uttered was an attempt to sing part of the Requiem’s timpani line.

Final Days

At some point—we can’t know when—Mozart would have realized that he wasn’t going to get up again. That the Requiem, at first an intriguing commission, had now become an elegy for himself. According to one story, that moment may have come during work on the “Lacrimosa,” of which he managed only eight bars. Just one day before he died, he apparently gathered together Constanze, Süssmayr, and a few singers from the Magic Flute, which was still playing across the street, to sing through the Requiem. When they reached the Lacrimosa, he burst into tears, saying that he could not go on. Those eight bars are likely the final notes he penned.

I want very badly for this story to be true. The opening measures of the “Lacrimosa” stand out in the Requiem as a moment of outsized grief. Musicologist Jan Swafford deems it “a little world in itself: two bars of a mournful fragility, two bars as if quietly sobbing, then a rise to a peak of sorrow.” It seems irresistibly fitting for that to be his final phrase.

Mozart’s passing did not go unnoticed, as many would claim. While the location of his exact grave is unknown, Mozart was given a decent-sized funeral. His death was announced in the papers, and memorials were held in Prague, Vienna, Kassel, and Berlin. When the news of his death reached Haydn, the composer was reportedly so shaken that he began to question his own faith, later recalling that, “for some time I was quite beside myself over his death, and could not believe that Providence should so quickly have called away an irreplaceable man into the next world.”

Music and Legacy

With a backdrop fit for the theater, it’s tempting to attach extra significance to the Requiem, but I believe Mozart would have written exactly the same piece whether he was dying or not. He was a perfectionist, fastidious in his work, and a consummate student of music. At the time of the Requiem, he had become engrossed in the works of Bach and Handel, absorbing the complex Baroque techniques like fugue, which can be heard to full effect in the “Kyrie.”

He also had a flair for drama. In places, particularly in the “Dies irae,” we can hear echoes of Don Giovanni being dragged to hell. In the “Tuba mirum” and “Recordare,” the featherlight quartet writing recalls moments from Così fan tutte and The Marriage of Figaro. He was an opera composer at heart, and knew exactly how to render a scene. As Swafford said, “This is a musical world that seems not just to evoke mourning but to emerge out of the shadow of death itself.”

Despite Süssmayr’s best efforts, there is a discernible shift as the piece becomes more his own writing than Mozart’s. When the “Offertory” begins, Mozart’s voice is still strong, but as it progresses, he fades. By the “Sanctus,” he’s just a shadow; only his influence remains. Thirty years earlier, Leopold Mozart had asserted his little child prodigy was a miracle of God. Today, Mozart is indeed something of a deity. Perhaps what the Requiem truly captures is his transfiguration.

— Notes by Valerie Sly, 2026