Wolfgang Mozart died on Dec. 5, 1791, leaving behind an unfinished Requiem Mass, commissioned anonymously by Count Franz von Walsegg, a 28-year-old Austrian nobleman who had the ignoble habit of passing off works he commissioned as his own. The Requiem was intended to be a memorial to the count’s 20-year-old wife, Anna, who had died earlier that year.
Mozart’s wife, Constanza, arranged for some of Mozart’s pupils to complete the unfinished Requiem and eventually delivered it to Count Walsegg in order to receive the full commission fee promised her husband.
But just five days after Mozart’s death in 1791, the portions of the Requiem that Mozart had completed were sung at a memorial service organized by his friend and collaborator Emanuel Schikaneder.
Schikaneder was the librettist for Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute and ran his own opera house at the Theater auf der Wieden in a Viennese suburb. It was there that Mozart’s Magic Flute had premiered, and it was Schikaneder’s musicians who performed parts of Mozart’s Requiem for the first time on today’s date in 1791, at St. Michael’s Church in the center of Vienna.
Wolfgang Mozart (1756-1791) Requiem