by Enrico Melozzi
This is installment four of thirteen. The thesis is in installment one and does not change. What follows serves to prove it.
Stuppach Castle, near Gloggnitz, an evening in the mid-1780s. Twice a week, on Tuesday and Thursday, Count Franz von Walsegg gathers his little orchestra: a few servants who play, salaried professionals like the cellist, passing guests. Music is made for hours. At some point new parts arrive in the room, with no author’s name, copied in fine calligraphy by the count in person. They are played at sight, and at the end the count asks the customary question: whose music can this be? Someone ventures a guess, the shrewdest stay silent, and the answer the host awaits always comes: yours, Count. He smiles and does not confirm. But he has them bound with his name on them.
The document that lets us enter those evenings exists and is a primary source: the memoir written in 1839 by Anton Herzog, a schoolmaster in Wiener Neustadt, who had played in that orchestra for years. Herzog describes the system with the precision of someone who wants to unburden himself: the count commissioned in secret, recopied in his own hand on ten-stave paper to eliminate other people’s handwriting, had the music performed, let it be understood. He cites the flute quartets bought from the composer Franz Anton Hoffmeister, which circulated as works of the count. And he specifies the point that interests us: thus, with the same method, through the same lawyer Sortschan who also handled the order for the funerary monument for the countess, the Requiem was commissioned from Mozart for the anniversary of Anna, who died on 14 February 1791 at twenty. Not an exception, then: a house practice, applied to the most serious grief.
The reasoning of this installment lies entirely in one question: what changes, in the nature of a work, if it is born to be signed by another? Everything the legend has built changes. The Requiem as told by romanticism is a testament: the man who feels death and writes for himself, omen after omen. But a testament is signed. Here, by tacit contract, the signature was sold along with the paper: Mozart worked knowing that those pages would be recopied by the count’s hand, stripped of his name, performed in a provincial church as the music of a wealthy amateur. Can one write one’s own spiritual testament inside such a contract? Anything is possible for a man of the theatre. But the most economical hypothesis, the one that needs no omens, is that Mozart treated the commission for what it was: a delivery, well paid, to be organised with the efficiency of the workshop we saw in installment three, reserving his deepest investment for the pages worth the investment. Which pages those were, we will see in three days.
There is a postscript that Herzog tells and that lights up the character better than a portrait. When, years after Mozart’s death, the widow had the Requiem published, the count, who had paid for exclusivity and for the signature, found himself robbed of his own theft. He thought of going to law; then, as a practical gentleman, he negotiated and let it drop. He could not, for that matter, publicly claim authorship of a work that all of Europe now attributed to a famous dead man: the thief of signatures had been outflanked by a market larger than himself.
And the last fact, the closing one, carries a date and a place: 14 December 1793, church of the Neukloster, Wiener Neustadt. That day, before the choir stalls, a requiem mass was performed for the soul of Countess Anna. On the podium, conducting, the widower. On the score, recopied in his own hand, the title that Herzog quotes verbatim: Requiem composed by Count Walsegg. The man who ordered the Requiem performed it under his own name.
This chapter is part of Enrico Melozzi’s inquiry into the Requiem. Installment five comes out on Sunday 13 September at 6:30 pm, and stops where everyone stops: at the eighth bar of the Lacrimosa. Then it looks at the next sheet.