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

Like much else in Mozart’s short life, his seven-month appointment as adjunct
Kapellmeister at St. Stephen’s Cathedral has the character of unfulfilled promise. One can
easily envisage the prospect of great Mozartian “middle-period” masses taking their place
alongside Haydn’s late set of six, for example, or the possibility of Mozart completing the C
minor Mass and the Requiem. Yet a return to the church, and a return to a salaried position
with the obligation of regular creative production, certainly challenges some of the more
cherished ideas we have about the Viennese Mozart, the freelance musician. Ulrich Konrad
envisages a Domkapellmeister Mozart who was already tiring of such work by 1798: “Messen
und Vespern komponieren, das allsonntägliche Musizieren auf der Kirchenempore, das
befriedigte ihn zunehmend weniger.” 252 Mozart would have had to deal with officials like
Andreas Furthmoser who possessed a Colloredo-like zeal for financial restraint, and
accommodate further changes such as the demolition of the Kapellhaus in 1803. 253 Unlike
Albrechtsberger, who by his own admission was little interested in music outside the
church, 254 Mozart was internationally famed for his operatic and instrumental music, and
reconciling the demands of the Kapellmeister post with commissions from the Theater auf
der Wieden and elsewhere might have tested even Mozart’s legendary productivity.
Such speculations attempt to satisfy a natural curiosity about the possible trajectory
of the composer’s life and music after 1791. Had Mozart lived and taken up the position of
Kapellmeister at St. Stephen’s, then truly “the history of church music would have taken a
252 Ulrich Konrad, “Mozart 1806,” Acta Mozartiana 48 (2001): 112. See also Robert Marshall, “Wenn Mozart
Länger Gelebt Hätte: Eine Wissenschaftliche Fantasie,” in Über Leben, Kunst und Kunstwerke: Aspekte
Musikalischer Biographie. Johann Sebastian Bach im Zentrum, ed. Christoph Wolff (Leipzig: Evangelische
Verlagsanstalt, 1999), 270-81.
253 Brunner, Kantorei, 21.
254 See Albrechtsberger’s letter to Christoph Gottlob Breitkopf of 17 August 1798, quoted in Dorothea
Schröder, Die Geistlichen Vokalkompositionen Johann Georg Albrechtsbergers, 2 vols. (Hamburg: Verlag der
Musikalienhandlung K.D. Wagner, 1987), 240-41.
340