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

(apart from particella for wind and drums for the ‘Sanctus’ and ‘Osanna’) these
movements survive only in a copy made by Pater Matthäus Fischer (1763-1840).
Unfortunately, Fischer—not a particularly accurate copyist at the best of times—
allowed only four staves for the choral parts, so only four parts out of the eight (not
necessarily the same four parts throughout) are preserved in his manuscript. Every
edition of the C minor mass is therefore, almost by definition, a restoration; quite apart
from any question of completing what Mozart left unfinished.
THE REQUIEM, K.626
Mozart’s Requiem, by contrast, existed in a complete performing edition for
quite some time before doubts arose about its authenticity. Once Georg Nissen had
explained the situation to him, Count Walsegg generously accepted the patched-up
Requiem as a fulfilment of the terms of the contract, and Süssmayr’s contribution was
quietly forgotten. It was the theorist and musical journalist Gottfried Weber (a friend,
but no relation to Carl Maria) who first in 1825 raised the question of the Requiem’s
real author with an article in no.11 of his periodical Cäcilia. Radically out of
sympathy with Mozart’s traditionalist understanding of the Requiem mass (for
example he saw the ‘Dies Irae’ text as ‘a superb vision of elemental terror marred by
Monkish servility’; he set only the first six strophes in the Requiem he wrote himself),
Weber was, of course right—and quite wrong as well, for he attributed to Süssmayr
parts we know to have been written by Mozart, and vice versa. 70 In particular he had a
low opinion of the more contrapuntal movements, damning the ‘tortuousness’ and
‘pedantry’ of the Kyrie fugue, and criticising what he assumed to be its dependence
upon a Handelian model (presumably ‘And with his stripes’). Weber’s crusade is a
70 Novello, Mozart pilgrimage, p.123.
300