Picking up the pieces ... an unfinished portrait of Mozart at the keyboard by Joseph Lange
Since the early 19th century, when it became widespread to suppose that art expressed its creator's life and character, an air of mystery has attached itself to an artist's late or last works. This mystery has traditionally been at its most intense in music, and particularly so when the piece in question is left unfinished, such as in Bach's Art of Fugue or Mozart's Requiem. We listen breathlessly, as we might read a rich relative's last will and testament: "And I leave my entire fortune to ... [dies]."
For the listener, this mystery adds an extra aesthetic layer to the musical experience; for unfinished works, the door is always open, because something concrete about the composer's life - or, rather, death - has left its mark; but for performers and musicologists, the question is often the more mundane: "What should be done?" Should such works be left alone, sound trailing off at the moment we imagine the pen to have fallen from the composer's failing grip? Or should we try to fill in the gaps?
In the case of Mozart's unfinished Requiem, the answer has usually been to fill in the gaps - within months of Mozart's death, his wife recruited one of the composer's pupils, Franz Xaver Süssmayr, to the task, and it is Süssmayr's rather tepid fulfilments of his master's promises that usually help Mozart's glorious choral extravaganza limp across the liturgical finish line. But precisely 215 years after Mozart's death, on December 5, a performance directed by Nicholas Cleobury in Canterbury Cathedral will attempt to fill in the gaps in a more interesting way.
Cleobury has commissioned entirely new music for the two movements for which Mozart left no record of his intentions, the Sanctus and Benedictus, by the composer Dominic Muldowney, and a completion, by the composer and musicologist Philip Wilby, of the recently discovered sketch by Mozart for the Amen. He is also going to sprinkle the performance with short "commentaries" - musical reflections on aspects of the mass in a modern idiom - by composers such as Phillip Venables and Emily Howard.
Muldowney, much of whose experience as a composer comes from his work in the theatre, surprisingly said he felt undaunted by the prospect of stepping into the great composer's shoes: "Like a boy in a sweetshop", as he put it. His attitude in composing the new movements was to "exacerbate" Mozartian-style fragments to produce work that attempts to take us on a journey through the two centuries of musical history that separates today's listeners from Mozart's. Cleobury, too, said that he encouraged the modern composers to treat the revered work with a gentle irreverence.
Contemporary composers can have a hard time connecting with audiences these days. In exploiting the opportunities implicit in an unfinished canonical work, Cleobury's project will hopefully make such connections between past and present more tangible - though it is somewhat ironical to find a Requiem breathing life into new music.
Sounds New Mozart Requiem, performed by the Southbank Sinfonia, directed by Nicholas Cleobury, will be performed in Canterbury Cathedral on Tuesday 5 December at 9.30pm.
