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.

• Provides a new interpretation of this familiar work by emphasizing the reception of Mozart's Requiem pertaining to the legend as well as the known facts
• Discusses Mozart's work on the Requiem, paying attention to the completion by Franz Xaver Süssmayr and modern completions, presenting a rounded discussion of the Requiem as a whole, not just an account of Mozart's portions of it
• Combines different methods of scholarly enquiry - aesthetic, historical, theoretical, source- and reception-related - to suggest directions in which the study of Mozart's Requiem and Mozart's music more generally, will evolve in the future