Performances of Mozart's Requiem have always enjoyed a very special status in Vienna. As we know, Mozart was working on this setting of the Mass for the Dead when he died in 1791. Every year, at around the time of his death, it is performed in Vienna’s churches, including St Stephen’s Cathedral, where his remains were blessed on 6 December 1791 before being taken to the cemetery at St Marx's used by the parish of St Stephen in which the composer had died. There he vvas buried in a common grave in keeping vvith the custom of the time. But performances of the Requiem are also given at other times of the year in Vienna's many concert halls. Traditionally, the version of the work that is performed is the one prepared by Mozart's pupil, Franz Xaver Süßmayr, at the request of his widow, Constanze, the missing parts being added from sketches in a style similar to that found in the sections that had already been completed. Süßmayr’s own contribution is limited chiefly to the orchestration. In this form, Mozart’s Requiem was one of the most widely performed works of sacred music even by the 19th century. In the wake of the early-music revival, with its desire to return to the original form of pre-Classical and Classical pieces, there have been attempts to “correct” Süßmayr’s work and free Mozart’s Requiem from the sentimentality with which it became associated in the 19th century, an age that privileged Romantic textures and sonorities.
Nikolaus Harnoncourt was one of the first conductors and musicologists to set this development in motion. Harnoncourt was born in Berlin in 1929 but is an Austrian citizen. He was still a rank-and-file cellist with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra when, in 1953, he and his wife, the violinist Alice Harnoncourt, joined forces with some of his colleagues to found the Concentus Musicus. They played on period instruments, initially performing Renaissance and Baroque works. It was in no small part thanks to their many award-winning recordings that attitudes to the pre-Classical repertory changed, changes that affected not only the way in which these works were interpreted but also the listening habits and expectations of audiences as a result, not least, of the fact that many musicians and ensembles followed their example. As a conductor, above all, Harnoncourt himself soon moved on to the works of Viennese Classicism, whose original sounds he sought to recreate. After his highly successful cycle of Monteverdi operas in Zurich, he began a Mozart cycle at the same opera house. Starting with Idomeneo in 1980, he went on to add Mozart's other main operas, presenting them in a style that differed substantially from what was usual at that time.
Today Harnoncourt is regarded as one of the leading conductors of his age, at home in a repertory that embraces not only the great symphonies of Brahms, Dvořák and Bruckner and the operas of Haydn, Mozart and Schubert but also such popular favourites as Aida, Carmen and even Die Fledermaus. But he was still at the start of this development in the autumn of 1981, when the present recording was made. It says much for the initiative of the Vienna State Opera Chorus (officially known in its concert manifestation as the Konzertvereinigung Wiener Staatsopernchor) that for their first All Saints' Day concert they did not choose one of the conductors familiar to them from the State Opera but preferred to work with Harnoncourt, a sure sign that they were willing to strike out in a new direction here. The importance of the occasion was also recognized by Austrian radio and German television, both of which recorded and broadcast the performance.
By 1981, concerts of the Vienna State Opera Chorus could already look back on a long tradition. As long ago as 1927 its members had decided to follow the example of their orchestral colleagues, who in 1842 had established a democratically structured artists' collective under the title of the “Vienna Philharmonic". And so they founded their own independent organization, the "Konzertvereinigung Wiener Staatsopernchor", which has never been merely a concert choir. Independent events, tours, guest appearances at the Salzburg Festival and elsewhere and, last but not least, its countless recordings have all confirmed the status and reputation of this professional body of singers.
The present recording is taken from the ORF archives and conveys an idea of the very special atmosphere in the Goldener Saal of the Vienna Musikverein, a scene familiar to millions of television viewers from the Vienna Philharmonic’s annual New Year Concerts. And yet, although the present concert also took place during the late morning, the occasion could hardly have been more different in terms of its seriousness of purpose and concentration on music that is devoted not to pleasure but to thoughts of death and eternity. Equally unusual is the combination of the Vienna State Opera Chorus and the reduced forces of the Concentus Musicus playing on period instruments.
For the present performance Harnoncourt chose the edition of the work prepared by the German musician and musicologist Franz Beyer, a version that was receiving its Viennese premiüre. It is above all in its instrumentation that Beyer's version differs from Süßmayr’s, a version which, in Beyer's view, "translated Mozart's mighty fragment into the milieu of the popular language of the liturgical music that was much cultivated at that time." On the strength of a stylistic comparison with other works from the final period in Mozart’s life, Beyer came to the conclusion that Mozart would have orchestrated the work differently, with more sparing textures and more ascetic sonorities. This approach is underscored by the Concentus Musicus’s use of period instruments. Natural trumpets, hand horns, an early 18th-century kettledrum and two basset-horns not only blend in a novel way with the woodwinds and strings, they also influence the vocal aspect of the work, while also affecting the dynamics of the performance and even the choice of tempos. Even after a quarter of a century, the listener and spectator can still be thrilled by the attentiveness with which the soloists and members of the Vienna State Opera Chorus react to these different sounds and to the often unfamiliar phrasing of the Concentus Musicus, whose players support the conductor’s interpretation to the hilt. Harnoncourt, it will be noted, conducts without a baton.
The first part of the concert was evidently designed to put listeners in the right frame of mind for the day as a whole and for Mozart’s Requiem in particular: it comprised a performance of Bach's Cantata 161, Komm, du süße Todesstunde, in which two solo singers (alto and tenor) and a four-part choir are set against an instrumental ensemble made up of strings, organ and continuo, together with two concertante recorders. Harnoncourt’s vast experience in this field - together with Gustav Leonhardt, he recorded all Bach’s sacred cantatas with the Concentus Musicus and various chamber choirs - is impressively documented here.