Yannick and the Orchestra: Mozart's "Requiem' (2nd review)

The Philadelphia Orchestra's stellar performance of Mozart's Requiem reminded this listener that great music isn't merely the work of a few giants. Rather, it's the product of a historically evolving community of composers and performers.

The realization that one of Mozart's associates, Franz Xaver Süssmayr, completed the Requiem for Mozart and receives only parenthetical credit for it shakes up the "great man" theory of musical history. The Orchestra's additional performance of Debussy's Nocturnes and its influence on Stravinsky's Rite of Spring provided a further suggestion of how music develops as a communal, historically evolving process.

An electrifying performance of a magnificent work like Mozart's Requiem stirs many thoughts in the listener, and one of those might well be about a requiem for all the lesser known composers whom nobody remembers but whose work was part of the music-making of their time. Who ever heard of Gabriele Pierne or Alberic Magnard, for example? Yet each played a role in the creation of music of their day.

Disparaged but enduring

Thus it is with Franz Xaver Süssmayr, who worked for Mozart as a copyist and, when the latter was dying, took on the responsibility of completing the great Requiem. Critics are wont to disparage the shortcomings in Süssmayr's insertions, but his version has survived over two centuries, and the piece's overall nobility continues to do Mozart great justice.

Süssmayr's self-effacing generosity in serving Mozart and his wife Constanza— while others around the master engaged in a post-mortem feeding-frenzy— deserves praise as well. Mozart sketched the Requiem for Count Franz von Walsegg, who had anonymously commissioned the piece for a requiem mass to commemorate the anniversary of his wife's death. Ironically, it turned out to be in memorium to Mozart himself, who contracted a severe illness now thought to have been rheumatic fever. But this Requiem ought also serve to honor the composer of the obscure name who completed the composition in more than serviceable fashion, and whose career was also truncated at a young age, in Süssmayr's case by tuberculosis.

Requiem for a heavyweight?

Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor-designate of the Philadelphia Orchestra— who, like Mozart, has a theatrical-operatic bent— interpreted the Requiem forcefully and breathtakingly, rather than mournfully, and emphasized the rhythmic pulsation and emotionality of Mozart's music, bringing out as well the element of Mozart's individual struggle with his own illness and mortality at such a young age (34) and in the middle of a breakneck career. Yannick interpreted the piece as a modern requiem for a heavyweight, so to speak, with aspects not only of loss and grief but also of the anger and frustration of a life thwarted, of a hero not inclined to "go gently into that good night."

Mozart's reputation as a light and fanciful court composer, a scion of Papa Haydn, has obscured for many the power and passion in his best works. He anticipated the Romantic period in ways that are not often acknowledged, and Nézet-Séguin, with the help of the superb Philadelphia Orchestra, Philadelphia Singers, and top-notch soloists, gave an interpretation of the Requiem that could really be heard as a passion for life, one that explains why echoes of it can be heard in the requiems of Brahms, Faure and Benjamin Britten.

Debussy's inspiration

The selection of Debussy's Nocturnes as the work preceding the Mozart Requiem was also inspired, as it showed how a composer so different from Mozart was nevertheless influenced by his use of tone colors, especially in the strings, and in the use of recurrent rhythmic pulsation to convey activity and energy.

Music is an evolving creation of a community of composers who learn from each other. Stravinsky maintained a friendship with Debussy, and in Nézet-Séguin's rigorous yet lush evocations in Nocturnes, one could hear shades of Stravinsky in statu nascendi. The Nocturnes' "Festivals" movement anticipated by more than a decade features of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in its feeling of orgiastic energy and excitement; indeed its use of rhythmic repetition also appears in the work of the contemporary composer Steve Reich.

Based upon both this performance, and Nézet-Séguin's inaugural concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra in late October, it appears that he may rival his great predecessors— Stokowski, Ormandy, Muti, Sawallisch, Eschenbach and Dutoit— in the intelligence, conviction and panache he brings to the podium. In addition to his conducting skill and knowledge, Nézet-Séguin leads the listener into a richer comprehension of the musical repertoire. That's a very telling and positive omen for the Orchestra's future.♦


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