While Mozart had a commission to composed this music, it also turned out to be the Requiem for his own death in 1791.
Conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt describes Mozart’s Requiem as “an intensely personal confrontation, frightening and moving in the case of a composer who normally kept his life and experience divorced from his art to an astonishing degree”.
This recording uses a version published by Eulenberg in 1972; it seeks to come closer to the spirit of the composer himself, and it replaces the familiar instrumentation of Franz Xaver Süssmayr, who completed the Requiem shortly after Mozart’s death.
Here is this seemingly Holy work, performed at the St. Stephens Cathedral in Vienna, on the 200th anniversary of Mozart’s death:
