Daniela Bruera - Mozart: Requiem, K. 626 (Live Recording Expo 2015) (2019)

This recording was made in the Church of San Marco in Milan on 16 October 2016, within the 2014-15 institutional season of the Mozart Italy-Milan Association. Despite the imperfections that this type of recording entails, in an era of studio recordings, the uniqueness of the document combined with the rare artistic quality made it possible to decide to keep the original sound. In collaboration with CEriMus: "National Committee for the revival of basic musical education in every grade and order of school (r)".

In the world of visual arts, the concept of "authenticity" is of crucial importance, and can directly determine the commercial value of the work of art and its relevance in historical terms and, consequently, of fruition by the public. This is rather paradoxical, considering the role played by the "workshop" in the visual arts for centuries: a collective laboratory, which served as a school and a cooperative, a context of learning and creation, in which a certain number of students, apprentices and collaborators formed and cooperated under the guidance of a teacher. The fact that the value of a work often depends more on the name of the person to whom it is attributed than on considerations of a purely artistic / aesthetic nature is therefore an assumption, even if debatable, of today's consideration of the work of art. To some extent, this also depends on the romantic thinking of the philosophy of art, which, in the nineteenth century, was largely determined by music, which acquired ever greater weight in the hierarchy of the arts. Thanks also to the presence of extraordinary figures such as that of Ludwig van Beethoven, and to the phenomenon known as "Bach-Renaissance", the idea that the masterpiece was inextricably linked to the personality of the genius who had created it became more and more established. somehow, it was on a different level than that of simple talented artists. Art, it was argued, can not really be taught: genius is a characteristic (over) natural that can not be explained, an inspiration of which the principles can not be pedagogically transmitted. If this were simply true, of course, it would not make sense for many young artists to passionately seek out didactic contact with the undisputed masters of their art, nor try, even thanks to personal proximity, to discover the secrets of their skill. Also around Mozart, as with many other great musicians, a small circle of young musicians gathered together, anxious to learn from the brilliant master some technique and some compositional principle. Among them was Franz Xaver Süßmayr (1766-1803), just ten years younger than Mozart, and who was particularly close to the master in the last period of his short life. The examination of Süßmayr's works reveals him to us as a talented musician, endowed with a personality particularly suited for the composition of vocal music, and undoubtedly profoundly influenced by Mozart's style. On their human and professional relationship one of the most controversial and controversial events in the history of music is played, a relationship that has deeply fascinated even the non-specialist public, and has aroused a plethora of publications ranging from the most rigorous in the academic field (with a lot of calligraphic expertise and in-depth studies of the compositional style) to the most anecdotal, up to the pure and simple mythology.
Mozart died, not yet thirty-six, on December 5, 1791, leaving a widow, Konstanze, frightened and inattentive, two very young sons, an unbridgeable void in Viennese musical life, and an unfinished Requiem. The composition of this score had engaged him in the last period of his life, characterized by a feverish and passionate work in spite of the precarious and progressively getting worse health conditions.
The score had been commissioned to him (and here too, the discussions on the identity of the mysterious, anonymous client constitute a bibliography to himself); according to those who were close to him, the coincidence of the deterioration of the composer's health and the request to write a Requiem Mass led the young musician to live the creation of this masterpiece as a very personal, very intimate act, linked to omens of death and meditation on the final destiny of the human being.
At other times in his life, perhaps, Mozart could have considered the words of the liturgy almost as "pre-texts", in the etymological sense of the term, that is as "cues" in which to pour his own extraordinary imagination and musical imagination and thanks to give verbal form to his spectacular mastery of the composition for the human voice. In fact, from the vocality, Mozart had always been fascinated and seduced by attending the world of can.

The Messa da Requiem, musical form in which many of the greatest composers have left unforgettable scores, corresponds in some of its sections to the form of Mass in general (Kyrie, Sanctus / Benedictus, Agnus Dei), while it does not include two of the classic elements of Ordinarium (the Glory and the Creed) and is enriched, instead, with elements of the Proprium of the Office of the dead. In particular, the sequence Dies irae, whose Latin text, attributed to Tommaso da Celano, is a fascinating and vivid repertoire of powerful images, heartfelt supplications, intimate confessions and mixed feelings, has offered many musicians a unique opportunity to insert a a very personal and sometimes theatrical touch (or at least spectacular) in a liturgical context in which, normally, the values ​​to be pursued should be others.
The Requiem, in fact, is a prayer for the dead; however, inevitably, meditation on the destiny of man offered by intercession for those who are no longer among us ends up becoming an opportunity offered to the living to reflect on one's destiny and, according to the point of view of Christianity, arrive at a conversion that can assure their salvation.
To this end, poetry and music are allied in depicting, juxtaposed, the hope of an endless consolation and without shadows, the dismay that every human being experiences in the face of death, the conscience of his own sin, of having often misused the time and the gifts received from God, the fear of eternal unhappiness, the trusting and heartfelt prayer addressed to God's mercy for himself and for his loved ones.
All these sentiments and these spiritual and theological traits are found, with particular vivacity, in the Mozartian score, in which ancient and modern compositional techniques converge, operatic attitudes and moments of intimate intimism, almost timeless musical gestures in their antiquity and elements of revolutionary modernity. In the beginning of the escape of Kyrie we find the Mozart that, in Vienna, was passionate - thanks to the educated Barone van Swieten - to the study of Haendel and Bach: composers who, both, had used the "motif of the cross" to previous centuries, and formed by four notes that, also visually, represent the cross of Christ: in the case of Haendel, we find a beginning virtually identical in the chorus "And with His stripes" of the Messiah (of which Mozart had drawn an orchestration) , and in which, significantly, we contemplate the redemptive meaning of the Passion of Christ, invoked in the Kyrie comme Lord to whom to request mercy.
In the rhythm set by Rex tremendae another famous and celebrated topos returns, which countless composers have used (and will use after Mozart) to convey the idea of ​​royalty, royalty and majesty: a stereotype that Lully's music had conferred status of universally recognized musical symbol.
Equally charged with meaning and meaningful is the use of the musical timbre of the trombones, instruments linked to the concept of the divine as mysterium, as transcendence that provokes that feeling that the Bible calls "fear of God". In this case, even the young Mozart was well aware of this symbolic association, so much so that he explicitly requested by letter, to his father, sending trombones for the representations of the Idomeneo youth masterpiece: Mozart had felt the need for this particular symbol of the divine in order to transmit to his listeners the idea of ​​a terrible deity, terribilils, yet fascinating in its otherness.
We find again in the Requiem the exploration that in many years Mozart had incessantly led to the search for the expressive potential of the shade of D minor, which we often find associated in his music, with the mystery, the supernatural, the transcendence but also as a reflection on death. The tone that permeates the Don Giovanni, in the unforgettable scenes in which the earthly vitality of the protagonist confronts death, the sacred, and with what the mere will to live of man is not enough to govern, to understand, to master.

We find again the tenderness, the lyricism, the enchantment of melodism contained in some themes that only Mozart could write and that no one, neither before nor after him, has ever managed to match the infinite melodic profile of Recordare, in which the length of the sentence, which almost seems to challenge the natural resources of the human breath, manages to create an expressive tension that seems to embody the incessant supplication to which the text refers; or the last pages of his pen, that Lacrimosa in which we recognize compositional elements often emerging from his themes (Porgi, amor from the Nozze di Figaro come back to mind, or the piano theme in the first movement of the Concerto in D minor), yet modified slightly so as to maintain their semantic charge while acquiring new nuances.
We find, in the Requiem, the refined ability of an orchestrator that Mozart constantly cultivated over the years, starting from the love (or hatred) that as a child was nourished by certain timbres, and until reaching a complete mastery of the technical peculiarities and expressive instruments, especially wind instruments; we find a capacity for synthesis and stylistic compactness, for managing the compositional elements in the search for unity and variety through thematic references, recurring motifs and elements of continuity that pervade the entire score.
"The entire score": in fact, although occasionally, Süßmayr's hand is clearly recognizable in completing the composition entrusted to him by the widow, and sometimes there are passages of musical quality lower than others, however "the Requiem", in itself , presents itself as a unitary work, unified, engaging and exciting, moving and sublime, masterly and coherent. The discussions on the authorship of individual details are undoubtedly important for musicology and the history of music; but it is undeniable that, to listen, "the Requiem" can rightly be considered as one of the greatest masterpieces of religious music of all time, and as a marvelous expression of what is at the heart of the very concept of being human . If anthropologists identify the emergence of the cult of the dead as one of the characteristic moments of human evolution, it is precisely in questioning the meaning of life, in fearing death, in hoping or believing in a life beyond life, in raising our gaze to the infinite to which we tend that all, believers or non-believers, find each other again. And few musics succeed, like Mozart's Requiem (and Süßmayr) to give voice to everything in an equally effective, true, unforgettable and touching.
Cover notes: Chiara Bertoglio