Esto nobis praegustatum

Programme

An hour of music, without an interval. Please do not applaud between the numbers of the Requiem.

Performers and forces

Cristina Avilés, soprano; María José Cantos, contralto; Francisco Márquez, tenor; Esteban Serrano, bass. Mixed choir. The three works call for different forces. The Ave verum corpus: choir, strings and organ. The Laudate Dominum: solo soprano, choir, bassoon, strings and organ. The Requiem: two basset horns, two bassoons, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, strings and organ; tonight the basset-horn parts are played on clarinets.

The Requiem lacks flutes, oboes and horns, that is, exactly the instruments that give a Classical orchestra its brilliance. The colour is left to the low woodwind and the bassoons, with the trombones doubling the voices of the choir, and the orchestra sounds dark from the first bar.

The basset horn is a clarinet with a longer tube, with a lower, more veiled sound and notes the ordinary clarinet cannot reach. Today it is an uncommon instrument and its parts are usually given to clarinets, as in this concert. The substitution brightens the colour somewhat and requires a solution for the passages that go below the clarinet’s range; this is explained in the critical study.

Conductor’s note

Tonight’s title is the last line of the Ave verum corpus: esto nobis praegustatum in mortis examine, ‘be for us a foretaste in the trial of death’. Praegustare means to taste beforehand. The hymn says it of the Eucharist: what is received now announces what has not yet come.

Between the oldest work in the programme and the most recent there are eleven years. Mozart was twenty-four when he wrote the Laudate Dominum and thirty-five when he left the Requiem half-finished.

In 1780, in Salzburg, writing church music was part of his job. Archbishop Colloredo paid and wanted brevity, and Mozart complied. In a set of Vespers written out of duty he placed the Laudate Dominum: a solo soprano, a bass that moves on undisturbed and a long melody. The choir comes in at the end, almost in an undertone.

In June 1791 he wrote forty-six bars for the parish choir of Baden, a spa town near Vienna where his wife was spending some time. The Ave verum corpus was intended for the feast of Corpus Christi, which fell a few days later. It is a three-minute work for an amateur choir, and there is not a single loud passage in it.

That summer came the commission for a Mass for the Dead. It is best told without legends: there was no messenger dressed in black and no premonition of death. There was a music-loving count who wanted to present someone else’s work as his own, a good advance and a composer who needed the money. Mozart died before finishing it.

We have ordered the programme from light to shadow. The Ave verum is in D major and the Requiem in D minor: the same keynote, seen in two ways. We perform the version Franz Xaver Süssmayr completed in 1792.

It is worth knowing where the boundary lies, because it is not where it is usually said to be. The autograph of the Lacrimosa breaks off at the eighth bar, so what is heard from the ninth onwards is no longer music written by Mozart. But that does not make everything that follows someone else’s: in the Offertorium the voices and bass he left written return, and the work passes entirely into another hand only from the Sanctus onwards. The critical study sets this out number by number.

The works

Sung texts

The text printed is the one sung, which does not always match the liturgical one: Mozart cuts the end of the Ave verum and does not set the gradual or the tract of the Mass for the Dead. English translations made for this version from the original texts, following the Spanish translations by Clemente Mata Ruiz.

Layer 3 · Critical study

Academic layer. The statements rest on primary sources, critical editions and published studies, cited in notes (print version) and in the final bibliography. Where the documentation falls short, the text says so.

I. Sources and the completion of the Requiem

Few works in the Classical repertoire pose a problem of transmission like that of the Requiem KV 626: the version usually sung contains whole numbers that Mozart did not write and an orchestration that, except in the Introitus, is by other hands. This chapter describes the state of the autograph, reconstructs how the work was completed and summarises the current debate, in order to justify the version performed.

What Mozart left

The main source is the autograph in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna. Its state is not uniform, and that unevenness is the heart of the problem.

To this material is added a sketch preserved in Berlin with the beginning of a fugue on the word Amen in D minor, which was probably meant to close the sequence after the Lacrimosa. Wolfgang Plath identified and studied it, and it follows that Mozart was planning a fugal Amen which Süssmayr never wrote.

The Süssmayr problem

In a letter to Breitkopf & Härtel of 1800, Süssmayr stated that the Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei were entirely his own. Scholarship has questioned that claim from several angles. No one has seen the loose papers that, according to Constanze, Süssmayr received. Christoph Wolff argues that the dependence on Mozart’s materials was greater than nineteenth-century mistrust allowed. In that same letter Süssmayr explained that he repeated the Kyrie fugue in the Communio on Mozart’s own instructions, a liturgically correct and effective solution, even if the testimony is late and self-interested. And the errors of voice-leading in some passages are verifiable. Simon P. Keefe, on the other hand, has defended the coherence of Süssmayr’s orchestration decisions and proposes treating them as a criterion of his own rather than as mere error.

The modern completions

The debate reached its liveliest point in 2008, when the Journal of the American Musicological Society published Keefe’s article and, months later, a colloquy with Levin, Maunder, Druce, David Black and Wolff. That exchange is still the best introduction to the problem. Keefe later developed it in a book devoted to the reception and completion of the work.

Why Süssmayr’s version

This concert uses Süssmayr’s version. Technically it is not the best, but there are weighty reasons for choosing it. It is the only version known to those who knew Mozart and the one sung in 1793 before his widow. Two centuries of the work’s history are the history of this version. And no modern completion brings us closer to a Requiem ‘by Mozart’: all are hypotheses, and we prefer a declared historical hypothesis to a contemporary one presented as a restoration.

II. Context: Salzburg, 1780; Vienna, 1791

Sacred music as duty

The Vesperae solennes de confessore were written as part of a job. Mozart was court and cathedral organist in Salzburg, and composing liturgical music was among his duties. Archbishop Colloredo, enlightened and reform-minded, asked for brevity, intelligible text and restraint. The letter to Padre Martini of 1776, drafted by Leopold in his son’s name, describes the limits on length imposed on the Mass in Salzburg. The Laudate Dominum was born under those conditions and turns them into a principle of style.

Vienna, 1791: the year of return

The Romantic image of a dying, forgotten Mozart does not hold. 1791 is a year of intense work: La clemenza di Tito, The Magic Flute, the Clarinet Concerto, the Ave verum and the Requiem. Two facts frame his return to religious music: his appointment as Hofmann’s assistant at St Stephen’s and the end of the liturgical reforms of Joseph II, who died in 1790, which for a decade had reduced orchestral music in the churches of Vienna. David Black has studied Mozart’s relationship with sacred music in those years in detail.

The Ave verum and the Requiem are, therefore, works by a composer returning to a professional field that was reopening, and reading them as a spiritual testament is a later construction. The correction matters, because the testamentary reading has shaped the performance of the Requiem for two centuries, with very slow tempi and a mourning solemnity the score does not ask for.

The return to counterpoint

The style of the Requiem looks back to the Baroque. From 1782, in the circle of Baron van Swieten, Mozart studied Bach and Handel, and in 1789 he reorchestrated Messiah. That experience can be heard in the double fugue of the Kyrie, in the fugue Quam olim Abrahae of the offertory and in the Te decet hymnus of the Introitus, which uses the tonus peregrinus of plainchant. Wolff has also pointed out the relationship with the C minor Requiem that Michael Haydn wrote in Salzburg in 1771, which Mozart, aged fifteen, probably attended.

III. Formal analysis and questions of performance

Ave verum corpus

Binary form with instrumental introduction and coda; forty-six bars, D major, Adagio. The strings establish the register and colour in two bars, and the choir enters in homophony and never leaves it. The greatest tension comes at cuius latus perforatum, resolved with a modulation and suspensions. A chromatic descent at esto nobis praegustatum brings the music back to the tonic and the strings close alone. Lauri Suurpää has analysed the work as a tonal journey directed towards that ending, which translates into music the text’s idea of foretaste.

The marking sotto voce heads the score. Many of the dynamics found in performing editions are editorial additions, so it is advisable to work from a critical edition and decide consciously which dynamics to apply. The work has no written climax, and adding one is the conductor’s decision.

Laudate Dominum

F major, 6/8, Andante ma un poco sostenuto. Orchestral ritornello, soprano solo on the two verses, entry of the choir at the Gloria Patri, joint Amen and return of the ritornello. The bass moves by step in an almost unvarying pattern. The soprano’s phrase avoids regular four-square construction and is lengthened by cadential extension, which gives the impression of a seamless melody. The choir’s entry, the only strong articulation in the piece, comes piano and without preparation.

Requiem: tonal plan

The work begins and ends in D minor, and the Sanctus in D major is the only point of full light, placed where the rite calls for it. That design has been cited as an argument that Süssmayr had indications from Mozart about the ending.

The breaking point: Lacrimosa, bar 9

The autograph breaks off after eight bars of the Lacrimosa. Mozart had written the vocal line, the bass and the rising gesture of the strings in 12/8. The next two bars are in Eybler’s hand, and he stopped there; the rest of the number, up to the final Amen, was written by Süssmayr in the delivery score. Two consequences follow. The first is the missing Amen: the Berlin sketch shows that Mozart was thinking of a fugue, and Süssmayr resolved it with two chords. The second concerns performance: bar nine can be disguised or allowed to be heard. This concert does not underline it, but does not smooth it over either.

Performance criteria

The Iglesia de la Trinidad, completed in 1710, has a single nave with a barely outlined transept and a flat east end. The nave is covered by a barrel vault with lunettes and the crossing by a dome on pendentives. Those surfaces prolong the sound and favour mass at the expense of articulation. It is therefore advisable to articulate more shortly and to take the fugue tempi (Kyrie and Quam olim Abrahae) a little more slowly. This is decided at the rehearsal.

IV. Theological reading

The programme brings together three liturgical genres (Eucharistic motet, Vespers psalm and Mass for the Dead). Each asks of the listener a different attitude towards the text.

Ave verum corpus: presence

The text runs through the history of salvation in four lines: birth of the Virgin Mary, passion, pierced side and viaticum. What is decisive is the adjective verum: the hymn affirms the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Mozart responds with music without rhetoric. Hans Urs von Balthasar spoke of the perception of form: beauty as the way in which the divine becomes visible.

And there remains the verb of the title. Praegustatum: tasted beforehand. The Eucharist as a foretaste of death and of what comes after. That word links the motet with the Requiem that closes the evening.

Laudate Dominum: the praise of all peoples

Psalm 116 in the Vulgate is the shortest in the Psalter and also one of the most universal: it calls on all nations to give praise. Paul quotes it in Romans 15:11 to speak of the inclusion of the Gentiles. The doxology Mozart adds turns the psalm into a Trinitarian prayer, as throughout the divine office. And the choir joins the soloist precisely in the doxology.

Requiem: eschatology and supplication

The Mass for the Dead combines three registers: the plea for rest, the fear of judgement and trust in mercy. The tension between the last two is the theological centre of the work. The Dies irae, attributed to Thomas of Celano, comes from the severest medieval eschatology. The Recordare, by contrast, appeals to the logic of redemption: quaerens me sedisti lassus, ‘seeking me you sat down weary’. Mozart devotes to mercy the longest and most elaborate number of the sequence, a quartet of soloists without choir.

The Te decet hymnus of the Introitus is sung on the tonus peregrinus. At the start of his last work, Mozart literally gives voice to the Church’s plainchant tradition.

The ending

The Communio repeats the music of the Introitus and the Kyrie. Liturgically this is correct, because the rite for the dead is circular. Theologically it says something more: the eternal rest asked for at the beginning is sung at the end to the same music. We do not know whether that decision was Mozart’s or Süssmayr’s, but it is the happiest of the whole completion.

The arc of the evening

The order of the works follows a liturgical criterion, with chronology in the background: first the Eucharistic presence, then praise and finally the plea for the departed. The praegustatum of the Ave verum anticipates the trial of death, and the Requiem confronts it. The evening begins and ends on the same note. Joseph Ratzinger wrote that liturgical music must be ordered to the word and not imposed upon it. The forty-six bars of the Ave verum are a good example of that restraint.

Accessibility

What will happen

The concert lasts an hour, without an interval. The lights in the nave stay on at half strength. There are no sound effects or sudden changes of lighting.

The order is: a very short piece, of three minutes; a five-minute piece with a solo singer; and a long work, of about fifty minutes, divided into fourteen parts without a break.

The loudest moments are the beginning of the Dies irae and the Rex tremendae, within the long work. Anyone who needs to can use ear protection or ask the front-of-house staff to take them to the low-stimulation area.

Applause comes only at the end, when the conductor lowers their arms and turns towards the audience. You may leave at any time.

The concert in easy read

Audio description of the space

Text of the audio track, for those who prefer to read it.

Accessibility statement

This programme has been prepared following the WCAG 2.2 guidelines, level AA, and the standard EN 301 549.

This concert offers: accessible navigation with screen reader and keyboard, audio description of the space, an easy-read version, sung texts with translation in high contrast and enlargeable type, an anticipation guide and a low-stimulation area.

The programme will grow from concert to concert, and each new feature will be announced when it is available and tested.

Sources and bibliography

Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition, notes and bibliography system. Only primary sources, critical editions, scholarly reference works, official publications and published studies are cited.