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

Whatever attitudes Mozart may have held about the clergy, there is little to be gleaned from
contradictory accounts that grant no agency to the composer himself.
Both Eybler and Süssmayr claimed to have been present during Mozart’s final illness,
although it is only Süssmayr who maintained that Mozart had given him instructions about
the Requiem. 63 There seems little doubt that Mozart held Eybler in higher esteem than
Süssmayr, yet, despite his experience as a choirboy at the Vienna Seminary and his study
under Albrechtsberger, Eybler is presently known to have written just one sacred piece prior
to Constanze’s request for him to complete the Requiem. In 1781, at the age of 16, he
produced the large-scale Missa Sancti Hermani HV 1 for the first mass celebrated by his
brother Johann Hermann; see Figure 5.5. 64 It is a plenary mass containing settings of the
sequence Veni sancte spiritus and a motet, Numen aeternum...Semper ad te suspiro. 65 The
autograph, on a heavy “local” paper and in rather poor condition, makes clear that Eybler’s
hand underwent a number of changes over the ten years between this mass and the
composer’s work on Mozart’s Requiem. Eybler’s entries in the Requiem autograph score are
in fact among the earliest surviving examples of his hand after the mass of a decade earlier. 66
In contrast to Eybler, Süssmayr composed extensively for the church during his time at
Kremsmünster, producing at least one mass, a setting of vespers, a number of offertories and
63 AMZ 28 (1826): 338; MBA vi.504-05.
64 Karl Pfannhauser, “Zum Bicentarium des Komponisten Joseph E. v. Eybler,” Das Josefstädter Heimatmuseum,
no. 43 (1965): 65.
65 Hildegard Herrmann-Schneider, Thematisches Verzeichnis der Werke von Joseph Eybler, vol. 10,
Musikwissenschaftliche Schriften (Munich: E. Katzbichler, 1976). Herrmann-Schneider’s catalogue is in need of
substantial revision, as the archives of the Schottenstift were unavailable to almost all scholars before the 1980s,
and that archive contains the majority of Eybler’s sacred autographs. Karl Pfannhauser, characteristically, did
gain access; see Pfannhauser, “Joseph Eybler,” 62. The Herrmann-Schneider catalogue also fails to mention
many of Eybler’s works now extant in the Hofkapelle collection.
66 Note the divergent forms of the treble and, particularly, the bass clef. For an analysis of Eybler’s later hand,
see Agnes Ziffer, Kleinmeister zur Zeit der Wiener Klassik, vol. 10, Publikationen des Instituts für Österriechische
Musikdokumentation (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1984), 201-04. According to Herrmann-Schneider, the
autograph of Eybler’s string quartet HV 190/1 (Op. 1/1), dated April 1787, was twice sold by the Viennese
auction-house of Gilhofer in the early twentieth century.
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