Mozart's Requiem

Presenting a fresh interpretation of Mozart’s Requiem, Simon P. Keefe redresses a longstanding scholarly imbalance whereby narrow consideration of the text of this famously incomplete work has taken precedence over consideration of context in the widest sense. Keefe details the reception of the Requiem legend in general writings, fiction, theatre and film, as well as discussing criticism, scholarship and performance. Evaluation of Mozart’s work on the Requiem turns attention to the autograph score, the document in which myths and musical realities collide. Franz Xaver Süssmayr’s completion (1791–2) is also re-appraised and the ideological underpinnings of modern completions assessed. Overall, the book affirms that Mozart’s Requiem, fascinating for interacting musical, biographical, circumstantial and psychological reasons, cannot be fully appreciated by studying only Mozart’s activities. Broad-ranging hermeneutic approaches to the work, moreover, supersede traditionally limited discursive confines.

Author Biography

Simon P. Keefe is James Rossiter Hoyle Chair and Head of Music at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of Mozart’s Piano Concertos: Dramatic Dialogue in the Age of Enlightenment and Mozart’s Viennese Instrumental Music: A Study of Stylistic Re-invention and has edited five volumes for Cambridge University Press: The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music, Mozart Studies, The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia (with Cliff Eisen), The Cambridge Companion to Mozart and The Cambridge Companion to the Concerto. He is also the author of more than forty scholarly articles and book chapters.