Mozart, W A - Requiem (Rio de Janeiro version) - Malgoire, J-C (conductor)
The Centre International des Chemins du Baroque at Sarrebourg (France), which, as is well known, specialises in research into the musical heritage of Latin America, has just discovered the score of the conclusion to Mozart’s Requiem in Brazil, in the archives of the former cathedral of Rio de Janeiro.
Until now it was generally accepted that the Requiem, left unfinished by Mozart, had been principally completed by one of his pupils, Franz Xavier Süssmayr, who wrote the Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei in their entirety as well as completing important instrumental parts in the other movements of the work.
For its ending, however, Süssmayr provided no more than a disappointing literal reprise of the music of the opening Kyrie, thus ignoring the text of the Libera me despite the fact that this is an inseparable part of the Mass of the Dead in the Catholic liturgy. Yet that conclusion – the irremediable absence of which all musicologists had acknowledged as a fact – does actually exist; and it is in Brazil that it has just been discovered.
After Mozart, then Süssmayr, we know the identity of the ‘third man’ who terminated this immortal Requiem. The composer in question is the Austrian Sigismund Neukomm (1778-1858). A pupil of Michael Haydn in Salzburg, he became in 1797 a valued collaborator of his teacher’s illustrious brother, Joseph Haydn. But this now little-known figure was above all, at this period in his life, an indefatigable traveller. After St Petersburg and Paris (where he became a close friend of Talleyrand), he embarked in 1816 on the frigate Hermione, bound for Rio de Janeiro. There he met the mestre de capela to Emperor João VI, Father José Mauricio Nunes Garcia (1767-1830), and was immediately impressed by the latter’s talents as an improviser and above all composer.
We know that it was at his request that Neukomm wrote this Libera me to conclude the first performance of Mozart’s Requiem in the New World (conducted by Nunes Garcia on 19 December 1819 at the church of the Brotherhood of St Cecilia in Rio de Janeiro).