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

Closer to home, a benefit concert held for Constanze and her children at the Burgtheater on
23 December was ostensibly billed as a fundraising service for Mozart’s dependents, but
surely also functioned as a memorial of sorts. Although not attested by any of the usual
theatrical sources, this concert is known through reports in the Pressburger Zeitung, Brünner
Zeitung and the Weimar Journal des Luxus und der Moden. 111
Mozart was of course one of the most famous composers in Europe, but in age and
rank he placed decidedly below a figure like Gluck at his premature passing in 1791.
Twentieth-century scholarship had however long known of three newspaper reports from
late 1791 suggesting that a requiem mass was held for Mozart in Vienna. That three separate
sources all made mention of a particular event should have been sufficient to ensure that the
claim was taken seriously – supposed “facts” in Mozart scholarship have been based on much
less – but the skepticism of Otto Erich Deutsch in Dokumente ensured that the reports went
uninvestigated. 112 All this changed in 1991, when Walther Brauneis discovered yet a fourth
report of this event. Almost all of the information it conveyed had already been noted in the
other three reports, but its particular value lies in two features: it gives the location of the
service unequivocally as the Michaelerkirche in Vienna, and it provides a precise date, 10
December. 113 Further investigations at St. Michael’s revealed that a requiem mass of the
second class was indeed held for Mozart on that day. Quite obviously, this discovery
demanded a new evaluation of all four printed sources.
111 Deutsch, Dokumente, 379; Eisen, Neue Dokumente, 78; Link, The National Court Theatre, 182.
112 “Das Requiem, noch unvollendet, ist dort nicht für Mozart aufgeführt worden“; “Im übrigen enthält der
Botschafter wieder nur Phantasien“; “Diese frühe Nachricht über das Requiem entspricht im einzelnen nicht der
Wahrheit.” Deutsch, Dokumente, 374, 380, 526.
113 One of the other reports also mentions St. Michael’s, but this was taken erroneously to mean St. Michael’s
in Salzburg; Deutsch, Dokumente, 526, Ernst Hintermaier, “Eine Frühe Requiem-Anekdote in Einer Salzburger
Zeitung,” Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 26 (1971): 436-37.
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