MOZART AND THE PRACTICE OF SACRED MUSIC, 1781-91 a ...

welche Wonne!” in Die Zauberflöte, a chorus that shares the tonality, texture and unexpected
harmonic turn of Ave, verum corpus, although the musical language is more conventionally
seated in late eighteenth-century techniques.
Judging by the small number of contemporary copies, Ave, verum corpus was not
immediately popular after Andre’s print made it generally available in 1808, even in
Vienna. 246 The motet’s later fame was likely due to its relatively low technical difficulty, the
growing mystique surrounding Mozart and his last year, and the easy arrangement of the
accompaniment for organ alone in the increasingly common situations where no other
instrument was available. If Mozart had lived beyond 1791, Ave, verum corpus would be seen
as a milestone in the composer’s increasing attention towards sacred music. As it is, the
motet stands with the Requiem as a reminder of what might have been. K. 618 is smaller in
scale than its companion work, to be sure, but in its self-contained eloquence, it speaks
equally effectively of the kind of music Mozart had every intention of pursuing in 1792 and
beyond.
In early December 1791, as the St. Stephen’s musicians engaged in their pay dispute, their
adjunct Kapellmeister turned his thoughts to the Cathedral with an understandable
frustration. According to a garbled version of the story as told by Constanze in 1828,
...three days before his death he [Mozart] received the order of his appointment from the
Emperor [sic] of being music director at St Stephen’s which at once relieved him from the cabal
246 In 1811, Anton Wranitzky contrafacted the work as a gradual, Magnae Deus potentiae, and conducted it
under his own name at the wedding of Gabriele, daughter of Count Maximilian Franz von Lobkowitz. The
Hofkapelle in Vienna did not possess parts for Ave, verum corpus until the 1820s; A-Wn, HK 2698 is a mixture
of printed and manuscript parts based on Diabelli’s reprint, with a first performance date of 1826. A set of parts
in H-VEs, Grad. 305 is dated 1817. Like the history of the Andre print, the issue of early manuscript copies of
K. 618 is unaddressed in Federhofer’s critical report to the NMA (I/3).
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