Spotlight Mozart: The Requiem

This is really a farewell piece. The Requiem was Mozart’s last work (completed by his pupil Süßmayr) and it was performed at Karajan’s memorial service on 23 July 1989, a week after his death.

Mozart’s unfinished “funeral mass” is one of the great mysteries in musical history. Was it the composition of the Requiem that killed Mozart? Was “quam olim d: C” the last thing Mozart wrote? Who was “the grey-clad messenger”? A surprising fact concerning Karajan is that he conducted the Requiem later than many other cornerstones of his repertoire (when Toscanini died in 1957, Karajan conducted the State Opera Orchestra with Mozart’s “Masonic Funeral Music”). Without having conducted it with the Ulm or Aachen orchestra or even with the Philharmonia or the Vienna Philharmonic after the war he started performing and recording it with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1960/61. Then he performed it four times with the Vienna Symphony, also at their last joint concert (of 240 all told!) in November 1963. The first performance with the Vienna Philharmonic was in Salzburg in 1960 at the recently opened new Festspielhaus. Karajan took the singers he had in his “Don Giovanni” cast (Price, Waechter, Berry) and added Wunderlich and Rössel-Majdan.

A special occasion was the memorial concert for his friend and mentor Bernhard Paumgartner in 1971. Karajan conducted the Vienna Philharmonic – naturally in Salzburg where Paumgartner taught the Karajan brothers in the 1920s and 1930s. Karajan’s 1976 recording of the Requiem with the soloists Anna Tomowa-Sintow, Agnes Baltsa, Werner Krenn and José van Dam is often regarded as his finest. Gramophone identified “a surprisingly passionate and devotional element” and praised his last studio recording ten years later as being “even deeper”.

In his will, Karajan had asked for the Mozart Requiem to be performed at his memorial service, and he also suggested the conductor and the singers. And so it happened. A week after Karajan’s death, Riccardo Muti conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in Salzburg Cathedral. The soloists were Anna Tomowa Sintow, Agnes Baltsa, Gösta Winbergh and Ferruccio Furlanetto. Exactly ten years after Karajan’s death, on 16 July 1999, the Berlin Philharmonic played the Requiem under Claudio Abbado’s baton in Salzburg.

—  P.R. Jenkins