J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

This was not the case two hundred years ago, when Mozart’s oeuvre was being
collected and published (most of it for the first time), and from then onward numerous
publishers, composers, and editors have taken a hand in the project of rescuing
Mozart’s fragments: Simon Sechter, A. E. Müller, Anton André, J. F. Eck, August
Klengel, Rainer Bischof, Richard Maunder, and others. Like Die Kunst der Fuge, the
‘great’ C minor mass K.427/417a and the Requiem have received a number of
attempted completions, from F. X. Süssmayr (Requiem, 1791) to Alois Schmitt (Mass,
1901) to Richard Maunder (Requiem, 1990) and Robert Levin (Requiem, 1994, and
Mass, 2004).
MAXIMILIAN STADLER AND K.401/375E
The most indefatigable completer of Mozart’s unfinished movements,
however, was the Abbé Maximilian Stadler (1748-1833). As well being a musician he
was a music historian (his unpublished Materialien zur Geschichte der Musik unter
den österreichischen Regenten was the first history of music to be produced in Austria)
and a priest (prior of Melk, 1784; abbot of Lilienfeld, 1786; abbot of Kremsmünster,
1789). He befriended Mozart in Vienna, and catalogued Mozart’s musical estate with
Constanze during 1798-99, advising her in dealing with publishers. He was a
composer of some significance, but his own oeuvre has been far overshadowed by the
work he undertook to render Mozart’s fragments publishable. Almost literally a ‘ghost
writer’ for Mozart, the industrious Stadler completed no fewer than seventeen
fragments, some requiring a very considerable amount of composition. There are four
Kyries, a cantata, five sonata movements for clavier (with or without violin), three
fugues, and a few other miscellaneous items.
There are two distinct types of completion involved here. The exposition of a
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