Mozart & Salieri: Requiem

Two illustrious composers at odds with their Requiem? When, in 1791, a 36-year-old Mozart composed the one that would remain unfinished due to his death, he did so in response to a commission from the eccentric Count von Walsegg. Mozart would never hear his music. At the time, Salieri was at the height of his glory at the age of 41, famed for his operas from Paris and Milan to Rome and of course Vienna, where he was Court Composer and Director of the Italian Opera. Having put an end to his lyrical career, in 1804 he composed his Requiem, which was strictly intended for his own funeral, where it was indeed played - in 1825. Herve Niquet brings us these two monuments of Viennese liturgy with panache. Could Mozart have been imagining his own funeral when he composed his sublime Requiem? What could be a more fantastic musical celebration of a genius?

Overdue coexistence
In the 18th century, funeral masses were usually commissioned works that a composer performed as part of his official duties, and which were rarely offered to him from outside. In this respect, the requiem settings by Mozart and Salieri presented here by Hervé Niquet and his Le Concert Spirituel stand out. Moreover, they have more in common than one might at first think. Although they had different approaches and developments, Mozart and Salieri shared the same musical language of Italian classical music, which set the tone in imperial Vienna at the time. Their two Requiems are eloquent testimony to this, especially since they drew inspiration from requiem masses written by other Austrian composers: the Requiem composed in 1771 by Michael Haydn in Mozart's case and the Requiem composed in 1803 by Joseph Eybler in Salieri's case. The two works borrow some of their most haunting effects from the world of the stage, as both were also born opera composers. While Mozart wrote the requiem mass for an unknown patron and was ultimately unable to complete the work due to his unexpected death while working on it, Salieri wrote his mass for himself in 1804, fully aware that several composers he knew had begun their requiem settings "too late" and that they therefore remained unfinished (in addition to Mozart, this also applies to his teacher and mentor Florian Leopold Gassmann)

The fact that the two fascinating works appear side by side on CD today is due not least to Salieri's overdue rehabilitation in recent years. The defamatory image of Salieri as a poisonous envious person has long since been transformed into a respectable contemporary of Mozart. And that is a good thing!