News

Shortly after 9/11, and very definitely as a personal response to that event, I wrote an article about Requiems for Cdnow, where I worked at the time (just a few blocks away from Ground Zero; fortunately our workday started at 10 Am, so I wasn't there yet that day, but in the weeks that followed there were days where, if the wind came from the wrong direction, we would go home early, it made us so sick). In the years since, I have written about music composed in response to that tragedy, such as John Adams's On the Transmigration of Souls. But now I find myself being drawn back to the Requiem idea. Here's a much-expanded take on it.

This roughly chronological list confines itself to works with a sacred basis, though the 20th century yielded secular Requiems, most notably Paul Hindemith's When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom...

On December 10, 1791, after Mozart had died five days earlier at age 35, there was a memorial service in Vienna, and for the first time some of his Requiem was performed. It was not noted then what parts were played, but H.C. Robbins Landon, who has studied the Requiem completion in some depth and made his own edition, makes the obvious nomination: the movements that Mozart had largely completed, the Introit (Requiem aeternam), which was fully finished, and the Kyrie, for which Mozart had written all the vocal parts and the basso continuo, and which thus needed only the orchestration, which was accomplished at least well enough for that first performance by Franz Jakob Freystädtler (a student of Mozart's) doubling the choral parts with instrumentation, while another student of Mozart's, Franz Xaver Sűssmayr, composed original parts for trumpets and timpani.

Jan Swafford recently wrote, "Like most composers of the Enlightenment,...