Mozart accepts a mysterious commission and begins his Requiem

Story: 1791 C.E.  |  Last updated: July 1, 1791

In the summer of 1791 C.E., a gray-cloaked stranger knocked on the door of a sick and increasingly anxious Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The visitor delivered a commission — anonymous, on strict terms — for a Requiem Mass. Mozart accepted. What followed was one of the most haunting creative episodes in the history of music.

What the evidence shows

• Mozart Requiem commission: An unknown messenger arrived at Mozart’s door in early July 1791 C.E., requesting a Requiem on behalf of an unnamed patron — later identified as Count Franz von Walsegg-Stuppach, who wanted the work to commemorate his late wife.
• Unfinished manuscript: Mozart completed only the opening Requiem and Kyrie movements before his death on December 5, 1791 C.E., at age 35; he left sketched voice parts and bass lines for several later sections.
• Posthumous completion: Mozart’s widow Constanze first asked composer Joseph Eybler, then Mozart’s pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr, to finish the score — Süssmayr copied the entire work in his own hand, making it nearly impossible to determine who wrote what.

A composer in decline, a mind still burning

By 1791 C.E., Mozart was exhausted, financially strained, and in poor health. He had spent much of the year working at a frantic pace, completing The Magic Flute and La clemenza di Tito while managing debts and personal anxieties. When the anonymous commission arrived, something about it unnerved him deeply.

According to accounts passed down through Constanze and his friends, Mozart became convinced the commission was a kind of omen. He believed he was writing his own funeral music. Whether that belief reflected genuine premonition or simply the psychological weight of illness and overwork, it shaped the emotional intensity with which he threw himself into the piece.

He worked obsessively. But the body could not keep up with the mind. Mozart died on December 5, 1791 C.E., before the Requiem was finished.

The mystery of the gray stranger

The anonymous commission became one of music history’s most durable legends. For a time, suspicion fell on Antonio Salieri — Mozart’s rival, and the villain of the 1984 C.E. film Amadeus. Musicologists have since dismissed that theory almost entirely.

The messenger was almost certainly Anton Leitgeb, valet to Count Franz von Walsegg-Stuppach — a Viennese nobleman who had a known habit of commissioning music and presenting it as his own. The Count wanted a grand Requiem to honor his wife, Anna, who had died earlier that year. He had no intention of crediting Mozart publicly.

It took Constanze Mozart more than a decade to persuade Walsegg to acknowledge her late husband as the Requiem’s true author. Her persistence preserved the historical record — and ensured Mozart received credit for a work he died trying to finish.

How the Requiem was completed

Constanze had a practical problem. Payment for the Requiem had already been received. If she handed over an incomplete score, the patron might demand a refund. She needed someone to finish the work — convincingly.

Her first choice, composer Joseph Eybler, orchestrated some sections after the Kyrie before declining to continue. The task then fell to Franz Xaver Süssmayr, a pupil who had worked closely with Mozart and received detailed verbal instructions about how the piece should be completed. Süssmayr composed the missing sections, then copied the entire manuscript in his own hand — blurring the boundary between what Mozart wrote and what he added.

Scholars have debated those boundaries ever since. Multiple performing editions now exist, each making different judgments about which notes are authentically Mozart’s. Several completions by later musicologists have attempted to strip back Süssmayr’s contributions and reconstruct what Mozart might have intended. None is definitive. The ambiguity is permanent.

Lasting impact

The Mozart Requiem entered the repertoire as one of the most performed and recorded choral works in history. It has been sung at the funerals of heads of state, performed to mark moments of collective grief, and studied in conservatories on every continent. Its D minor opening, the soaring soprano of the Lacrimosa, and the drama of the Dies Irae have shaped how Western music approaches death, mourning, and transcendence for more than two centuries.

Beyond its emotional power, the Requiem became a reference point for how to think about authorship, completion, and artistic legacy. What does it mean for a work to be “finished”? Who owns a composition when its creator dies mid-sentence? These questions, raised sharply by the Requiem’s complicated history, remain live ones in musicology, copyright law, and the ethics of posthumous publication.

Beethoven — who knew the debates well — put it simply: “If Mozart did not write the music, then the man who wrote it was a Mozart.”

The Requiem also became a window into how European classical music memorialized the dead — and how one composer’s final, unfinished gesture came to stand for something much larger than any individual biography.

Blindspots and limits

The Requiem’s story has been told almost entirely through European documentary sources — letters, manuscripts, court records — which center Mozart, Constanze, and a small circle of Viennese musicians. The Count who commissioned it, the wife he mourned, the working conditions that exhausted Mozart, and the social hierarchies that made anonymous patronage routine all sit just offstage, rarely examined with the same depth as the music itself. The folk and liturgical traditions that fed into the Latin Requiem form — spanning centuries of Catholic practice, regional variation, and earlier composers’ innovations — rarely get their due when the conversation turns to Mozart’s genius alone.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Classic FM — Mozart’s Requiem

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