A performance of Mozart’s choral masterpiece marks English National Opera’s return to the Coliseum. Its artistic director explains why the composer’s last work, written as he drew his final breaths, is his most loving and human
Mozart knew what it was to experience life interrupted. He was the youngest of seven children, five of whom died in infancy. Of his own six children, only two survived. Death wasn’t an abstract idea but pursued him from birth until his death in 1791 – the most productive and successful year of his life. The Requiem in D minor was his final work; he himself died before completing it. He was only 35.
As a Catholic, Mozart would have attended many requiems – church services for the peaceful repose of the dead. This Christian funeral rite asks an all-powerful God to accept a human soul into heaven.
Mozart set this liturgical text to music for a patron who had lost his young wife to illness earlier that year. But after his death, his widow, Constanze claimed that throughout Mozart’s last painful days he believed he was writing the Requiem for his own funeral. And he was. Even though it had to be completed by his contemporaries, the circumstances of the composition, combined with Mozart’s genius, make it no ordinary piece of music. It has the drama and humanity of his stage masterpieces. His operas wrestle with the beauty and complexity of being alive in the same way his Requiem grapples with the mystery of death. Composed by a man on the edge of consciousness, Mozart willed his last creation into life with his final breaths.
Mozart the showman couldn’t help letting everything rip on the Dies irae
Operatic music has an enormous capacity for embracing emotions when words – however powerful - cannot express the challenges of being alive.
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