Symphony Preview: The final problem

This weekend (November 9 and 10) Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in the first of two programs devoted almost entirely to the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791). Think of it as a mini-version of the fabled Mostly Mozart Festival at New York City’s Lincoln Center, which featured the work of Mozart along with other classical-era composers as well as contemporary composers inspired by the period.

[Preview the music with the SLSO's Spotify playlist.]

The two contemporary composers featured in our mini-festival weren’t directly inspired by 18^th-century music, but they have been cannily chosen to fit the mood and theme of each concert. Indeed, this week’s composer, Detlev Glanert (b. 1960), cites Mahler and Ravel as his primary influences. But in an evening that will feature Mozart’s last work, the Requiem in D minor, K. 626, Glanert’s "Vier Präludien und ernste Gesänge" ("Four Preludes and Serious Songs") is a perfect fit.

Published in 2005 and last heard here a decade ago, the work is an arrangement for baritone and orchestra (the original is for baritone and piano) of the last thing Brahms wrote, the Op. 121 "Four Serious Songs." The songs are pure Brahms, but the preludes that separate them are a mix of the two composers. Quoted in the program notes from its 2014 local premiere, Glanert says of the original music: "...I tried to use it and transform it like a stylistic muscle, so that the music starts in his world, is sliding slowly into our world, and then falling back again." Check out the SLSO’s Spotify playlist to find out what that sounds like.

Detlev Glanert Photo: Bettina Stoess Courtesy of the SLSO

Before Glanert, though, there will be Mozart: the Adagio and Fugue in C minor, K. 546, for strings. Described on the SLSO web site as “a dark and almost mystical vision,” the piece is a bit of an enigma in that it’s not clear why Mozart wrote it. “Perhaps,” writes Martin Pearlman in a program note for Boston Baroque, “it was a way of taking a brief time-out from symphony writing. But one might also wonder whether it may have been a way of immersing himself briefly in his old counterpoint studies before turning to his last symphonies and the intricate counterpoint that ends the ‘Jupiter.’”

Like Glanert’s “Four Preludes and Serious Songs,” the work is a mix of the old and new. The Fugue is an arrangement of Mozart’s Fugue in C minor, K. 426, for two pianos from 1783. Mozart composed a new Adagio to act as a prelude and, on June 26, 1788, entered the new work in his catalogue as “a short Adagio for two violins, viola, and bass for a fugue I wrote a long time ago for two pianos."

While the fugue was somewhat out of fashion by Mozart’s time, the work of German Baroque masters like Bach and Handel was still highly respected, especially by diplomat and enthusiastic musical amateur Baron Gottfried von Swieten. A patron of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, it was von Swieten who encouraged Mozart to study the music of Bach and Handel. By 1782, Mozart was a regular guest at the von Swieten household. As he wrote to his father Leopold that April, “I go every Sunday at twelve o'clock to the Baron van Swieten, where nothing is played but Handel and Bach.”

The results of that exposure to Baroque musical forms can be found in many of Mozart’s works other than the C minor Adagio and Fugue. The Symphony No. 41 (“Jupiter”), for example, concludes with a multi-voice fugato. More to the point, though, is Mozart’s use of counterpoint in the “Requiem”—most prominently in the “Kyrie” fugue but also in the opening “Requiem aeternam” and the “Recordare” sections.

Last heard here in 2022 under the baton of Houston Grand Opera’s Artistic and Music Director Patrick Summers, the “Requiem” must surely be one of the most controversial of all Mozart’s major works. Setting aside, for the moment, the raft of apocryphal stories surrounding its composition—of which there were many, even before Peter Shaffer’s play and film “Amadeus” added to the pile—it is, to begin with, only partly a Mozart composition.

The “Requiem” was written in the last year of Mozart’s life, 1791—the same year he composed not only “La Clemenza di Tito” but also “Die Zauberflöte” (“The Magic Flute”) and his K. 622 Clarinet Concerto. Maybe that’s why (as I wrote back in 2022) Mozart died before he could complete it—his creative spirit was just too strong for a body weakened by poverty and illness.

Indeed, the only part Mozart completed in its entirety was the opening “Introitus—Requiem.” The following “Kyrie” was mostly finished, but the rest was in various stages of completion when the composer died. What happened after that has been in dispute ever since.

We know that Mozart’s pupil and copyist Franz Xaver Süssmayr (1766–1803) was there right to the end to write down the music Mozart’s mind could create but that his dying body, racked with fever and with hands too swollen to hold a pen, could not commit to paper. Süssmayr’s completion, which included some of his own music along with Mozart’s, has long been the version most often encountered in concert halls and on recordings.

Choral director Duain Wolfe, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Philadelphia Orhcestra and Colorado Symphony Orchestra Chorus in the Mozart Requiem in 2023  Photo courtesy Bravo! Vail

But at least two other completions were done in the early 19th century and many musicologists have produced their own over the last four or five decades. Last year at the “Bravo! Vail” festival, for example, Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra in a 1971 edition by German violinist and musicologist Franz Beyer (1922–2018).

Perhaps the most extreme revision was published in 1988 by British mathematician and musicologist Richard Maunder (1937–2018), who jettisoned everything Süssmayr had done and substituted his own work. If you’re wondering what that sounds like, Christopher Hogwood’s 1983 recording of it with the Academy of Ancient Music is available on Spotify.

I have no idea which version Maestro Denève will be using this weekend but given that the SLSO’s playlist includes Herbert von Karajan’s very traditional recording with the Berlin Philharmonic, I’d lay odds on some version of Süssmayr. The only way to know for sure is to attend one of the concerts.

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, November 9 and 10, in Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue in C minor, K. 546; Detlev Glanert’s “Four Preludes and Serious Songs”; and Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, K. 626. Bass-baritone Dashon Burton is the soloist for the Glanert. For the Requiem he’s joined by soprano Joélle Harvey, mezzo-soprano Kelley O'Connor, and tenor Josh Lovell. Performances take place at the Stifel Center downtown.