Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the composer who died writing his own burial mass

In the final months of his life, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was composing a funeral mass under peculiar circumstances. The commission had arrived at his Vienna apartment carried by a grey-cloaked stranger — later identified as the valet of Count Franz von Walsegg-Stuppach, a minor Viennese nobleman who planned to pass the work off as his own composition and perform it in memory of his late wife. Mozart accepted. He needed the money. He also, by the later account of his wife Constanze, came to believe he was writing the mass for his own burial.

The Salzburg in which he was shaped was no sleepy provincial town but the seat of an Archbishop with princely authority, and his father Leopold understood what that meant. Mozart came into the world on January 27, 1756, the youngest surviving child of Leopold Mozart — a composer and violinist who recognised his son’s gifts immediately and spent the boy’s childhood systematically exploiting them. By age five, Wolfgang was composing original keyboard pieces. By six, Leopold had him on tour.

The European grand tour of 1763–1766 brought him before Louis XV at Versailles and George III in London, through Munich, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Zurich. Leopold managed these appearances with a showman’s calculation, testing the boy against impossible tasks — sight-reading, playing blindfolded, improvising on given themes — and documenting the results carefully. The tour established a young Mozart as a phenomenon without precedent. What it could not accomplish was turning a childhood phenomenon into a working composer with court employment, a problem that consumed the next decade.

The court position in Salzburg under Archbishop Hieronymus von Colloredo offered modest pay and no shortage of musical humiliation. Mozart composed prolifically — symphonies, divertimenti, serenades, sacred music, piano concertos — while chafing at a patron who expected him to stay in his place at the table alongside the servants. The break came in the summer of 1781, following a tour to Vienna with the Archbishop’s household. Mozart refused to return. The Archbishop’s chamberlain, Count Arco, showed him the door with a literal kick to his backside, an incident Mozart reported in outraged detail to his father. He moved to Vienna permanently and never held a court position again.

The decade in Vienna produced the work that defines him to posterity. The piano concertos composed between 1784 and 1786 — including the D minor K. 466 and the C major K. 467 — took the concerto form beyond its function as a showcase for keyboard virtuosity and turned it into a form capable of sustained dramatic argument between soloist and orchestra. The three operas written with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte between 1786 and 1790 — Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte — remain the summit of comic opera’s capacity for psychological precision. In Le nozze di Figaro especially, the emotional centre of the piece is occupied by the Countess’s two arias, which are not plot-essential but which Mozart insisted upon writing at his most harmonically sophisticated. The comedy accommodates them because Mozart built the comedy to accommodate them.

The 1984 film Amadeus, directed by Miloš Forman from Peter Shaffer’s play, created the dominant popular image of Mozart for the following half-century: a giggling prodigy destroyed by the envy of his mediocre court rival Antonio Salieri, who supposedly poisoned him. The poison story is not documented. Salieri lived for 33 years after Mozart and expressed no sustained guilt about him, despite the legend that grew from the Pushkin poem and the Rimsky-Korsakov opera. What the Amadeus myth usefully obscures is the actual pressure of Mozart’s final decade: financial anxiety of the kind that leaves a paper trail. The letters to his Masonic lodge brother Michael Puchberg — dozens of them, across several years — are requests for money of increasing desperation. Mozart moved from a spacious apartment on the Graben to progressively smaller addresses, continuing to compose at speed regardless of circumstance.

The summer of 1791 saw him composing on multiple projects simultaneously. Die Zauberflöte — a German-language Singspiel built around Freemasonic imagery, written for Emanuel Schikaneder’s popular theatre in Vienna — was completed and premiered in September to immediate success. La clemenza di Tito, an opera seria for the coronation of Leopold II as King of Bohemia, was composed in roughly eighteen days. The Clarinet Concerto in A major, K. 622, followed in October, one of the most complete late-career statements in the repertoire. By November 20, Mozart was bedridden with swollen limbs, high fever, vomiting, and sweating. He died on December 5, 1791, aged 35. The official record listed severe miliary fever. Medical historians have proposed streptococcal infection, acute nephritis, rheumatic fever — the cause of death remains unresolved.

The Requiem was completed by Franz Xaver Süssmayr using Mozart’s sketches and drafts. Whether Süssmayr’s completions accurately represent Mozart’s intentions is still debated — competing scholarly completions exist, but the Süssmayr version is what orchestras most frequently perform. Four of the eleven most staged operas globally are Mozart’s. The 626 works in the Köchel Catalogue remain the most performed body of composition in the Western classical tradition. The Requiem commissioned by an anonymous nobleman who planned to claim it as his own — left unfinished in a manuscript on a dying composer’s desk — is now one of the most performed sacred choral works in the world. Mozart never heard it.

Tags: composers, Die Zauberflöte, Don Giovanni, Le nozze di Figaro, Lorenzo Da Ponte, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart