It’s one of classical music history’s cosmic alignments that Mozart’s final composed notes were for his Requiem in D minor. Unfortunately, given that he didn’t actually finish the thing, it falls to the living to complete it somehow, starting with Mozart’s pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr, on down to the Austrian conductor Manfred Honeck.
Honeck’s solution, which he has led in various forms for more than a decade, involves incorporating the parts of the Requiem we know to be mostly Mozart’s work in a funeral liturgy, beginning and ending with tolling chimes. The product is high on drama, but – like any completion must be – imperfect.
After the opening knells, Honeck calls for an alternation of Gregorian chants and other works by Mozart, the Masonic Funeral Music and the Laudate Dominum movement from Vesperae solennes de confessore. The chants were sung by an offstage low-voice chorus, to arresting effect. The familiar opening and Kyrie of the Requiem followed. Honeck drew extremes from the choir and orchestra: ultra-short staccatos, quiet pianissimos, bombastic fortissimos. Choral consonants came explosively and word stresses showed their shapes. The Dies irae ran fast and hot. The Lacrimosa careered from very quiet to very loud in the opening eight bars.
Following another chant and two more Requiem movements, Honeck boldly chose to reprise the Lacrimosa, but only the eight opening bars, the last music Mozart composed before his death. This time, Honeck muted the dynamics and kept his gestures much smaller. A sudden, prolonged silence followed.
Now the performance did not return to the most frequently presented version of the Requiem, with the Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei thought mostly to be the work of Süssmayr. Honeck excised these movements entirely, instead turning to Mozart’s famous Ave verum corpus, performed in the quietest version imaginable. The orchestra started small and the choir came in small. In places where long notes would bloom in most interpretations, the choir kept their sound covered.
In the final few instrumental bars, Honeck conducted in a smaller and smaller pattern, ending with a diminuendo dal niente where he slowly clasped his hands together at his chin, as if in prayer. He held this position through the three final tolling chimes, and the audience held their silence for what must have been nearly a minute before a slight relaxation of Honeck’s posture gave permission to applaud.
The theatrical trappings – the offstage chant, the chimes, the silences – were über-dramatic, keeping the audience rapt throughout. What felt odd is the claim that this presentation is somehow liturgical. Several of the traditional requiem texts do not appear, sullied by Süssmayr. The reprise of the Lacrimosa is out of order. The sudden stop in the second Lacrimosa seems to suggest the death of Mozart at that moment in the drama, an event that takes place before the funeral. And whether we’re symbolically at a funeral or symbolically at Mozart’s death, why is the Ave verum corpus so, so quiet?
Better to go whole hog into the theatrics and abandon the liturgical idea. Chop up and reorder the Requiem more. Or present the Lacrimosa only once, cutting the Amen and returning to the first eight bars to prepare the grand pause. The music and the music-making are so good that a little conceptual retuning is all this program needs.
The first half of the concert consisted of a tepid Coriolan Overture and an appropriately fun-loving Haydn Symphony no. 93 in D major, with exquisite bassoon fart. Honeck has dramatics down cold, but maybe needs to touch up the script.
