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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.

It is a common article of faith that Mozart composed the most beautiful music we can know. But few of us ask why. Why does the beautiful in Mozart stand apart, as though untouched by human hands? At the same time, why does it inspire intimacy rather than distant admiration, love rather than awe? And how does Mozart's music create and sustain its buoyant and ever-renewable effects? InMozart's Grace, Scott Burnham probes a treasury of passages from many different genres of Mozart's music, listening always for the qualities of Mozartean beauty: beauty held in suspension; beauty placed in motion; beauty as the uncanny threshold of another dimension, whether inwardly profound or outwardly transcendent; and beauty as a time-stopping, weightless suffusion that comes on like an act of grace. Throughout the book, Burnham engages musical issues such as sonority, texture, line, harmony, dissonance, and timing, and aspects of large-scale form such as thematic returns, retransitions, and endings. Vividly describing a range of musical effects, Burnham connects the ways and means of Mozart's music to other domains of human significance, including expression, intimation, interiority, innocence, melancholy, irony, and renewal. We follow Mozart from grace to grace, and discover what his music can teach us about beauty and its relation to the human spirit. The result is a newly inflected view of our perennial attraction to Mozart's music, presented in a way that will speak to musicians and music lovers alike.

The life and works of Mozart are central to a due understanding of Liszt's development as pianist, composer, and conductor. Yet, this fact receives inadequate attention in scholarly studies. Liszt readily acknowledged that he 'owed the greater part of what he was as a musician to Mozart' and found identity and goal as he sought, as pianist and composer, to emulate the endeavors of the Viennese master. Like Mozart, he was a 'pioneer of progress' who refused 'to be bound by accepted modes of expression.' Like Mozart, 'he pushed virtuosity to utmost limits.' Like Mozart, he was seen by many as an iconic figure of German nationalism. In later life, Liszt took comfort from the fact that Mozart, his illustrious role-model, was not spared bitter experiences. 'As with every great genius,' both endured 'pain and suffering' in order to accomplish their task. In so many areas of musical activity and experience, Liszt mirrored his great Viennese master. Throughout Liszt's life, he remained devoted to the scrupulous study and execution of Mozart's music and played an important part in promoting a better understanding of both man and music via podium and press before, during, and after the Mozart Centenary Celebrations in Vienna in January 1856.

In this article, the film Amadeus is studied as a representation of musical genius. It is argued that the compelling portrayal of the composer's artistic persona displays elements of incongruity and paradox, as also suggested in mainstream Mozart scholarship. While it is acknowledged that the film fails to exemplify Mozart's life story factually or objectively, it is found simultaneously that the core narrative content is corroborated by authoritative biographical sources. In terms of an interpretive frame of reference, Salieri's dramatic monologue is one point of entry through which Mozart's persona is creatively construed in Amadeus, while the film's soundtrack may be seen as another, acting as a 'second narrative' that illuminates Mozart's inner being in a profound and extraordinary way. In this regard, the work of Leonard Ratner, Wye Jamison Allanbrook and Stephen Rumph serves as points of departure for reading Mozart's music as based in a rich lexicon of expressive signs and symbols. Understood in this way, Amadeus's soundtrack offers deep insight into human character and emotion, and, ultimately, also into Mozart's own consummate grasp of human existence.

The Hungarian artist Mihály Munkacsy's oil painting The last moments of Mozart (1885) is just one of several 'death-bed' visual reconstructions of the composer from the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Mozart's early death, and its connection to the unfinished Requiem, fascinated Romantic writers, biographers, music historians and several painters as well. Within this theme in Mozart's posthumous reception, Munkacsy's painting is one of the most dramatic images of the composer, and it stands as a testament to deeply rooted beliefs regarding Mozart's genius and creative destiny. The last moments of Mozart is representative of the romantic 'Dionysián' construction of Mozart that rose up against the prevailing classicizing or 'Apollonian' vision of the composer. While Munkácsy's large-scale canvas belongs to the sub-genre of Mozart deathbed iconography, it steers well away from the usual sentimentalized visual accounts that show the composer in the grip of emotional despair. Instead, the artist shows Mozart in the throes of a deeply internalized creative vision, synthesizing his life and work—death and the Requiem—in a visual transfiguration that elevates Mozart's last moments to something beyond the earthly. The last moments of Mozart, and other similarly 'kitsch' and neglected paintings of Mozart, may help us reflect upon the role of images in our own inherited conceptions of the composer.

Franz Xaver Süssmayr's letter to the publisher Härtel (1800) about his involvement in completing Mozart's Requiem implicitly and explicitly asks its recipient to take his contribution seriously. Positive appraisals of the entire Requiem in the early decades of the nineteenth century, read alongside this letter, invite reevaluation of Süssmayr's orchestration of the work. Early writings on Mozart's orchestration clarify that Süssmayr's countless musical decisions, large and small, would have carried genuine aesthetic resonance. Süssmayr's view that the winds should function primarily as support for the voices derives from Mozart's orchestration of the Introit, and manifests itself especially in voice doublings and frequent segues between vocal statements. The origin of his shaping of orchestration toward climactic points in the Lacrymosa, Sanctus, and Benedictus, however, is less clearly attributable to Mozart. Süssmayr's entitlement to a vision of his own for the completion of the work, one that may not follow Mozart's intentions in every respect, encourages us to consider putative “transgressions” evidence of active engagement with the work itself, rather than of musical misjudgment. Examining the Sanctus and Benedictus (for which no materials in Mozart's hand are extant) as well as the Sequence, reveals the consistency and coherence of Süssmayr's vision across the Requiem as a whole.

Robert D. Levin and others, as modern-day completers of the Requiem, comment on Simon Keefe's text, \"\"Die Ochsen am Berge\"\". It traces the early reception history of Franz Xaver Sussmayr's completion of the Mozart Requiem, concentrating largely on favourable evaluations of the finished work. For Levin, for example, implicit in Keefe's argument is that judgments from earlier times are inherently superior to what may be gained from examining the music itself, ultimately asserting that all knowledge acquired by later generations cannot aspire to the authority of contemporary record. Keefe responds, intimating that the level of debate remains at the level of exhibitions of machismo and self-interest.

Since its first publication in 1990,Brahms and His Worldhas become a key text for listeners, performers, and scholars interested in the life, work, and times of one of the nineteenth century's most celebrated composers. In this substantially revised and enlarged edition, the editors remain close to the vision behind the original book while updating its contents to reflect new perspectives on Brahms that have developed over the past two decades. To this end, the original essays by leading experts are retained and revised, and supplemented by contributions from a new generation of Brahms scholars. Together, they consider such topics as Brahms's relationship with Clara and Robert Schumann, his musical interactions with the \"New German School\" of Wagner and Liszt, his influence upon Arnold Schoenberg and other young composers, his approach to performing his own music, and his productive interactions with visual artists. The essays are complemented by a new selection of criticism and analyses of Brahms's works published by the composer's contemporaries, documenting the ways in which Brahms's music was understood by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century audiences in Europe and North America. A new selection of memoirs by Brahms's friends, students, and early admirers provides intimate glimpses into the composer's working methods and personality. And a catalog of the music, literature, and visual arts dedicated to Brahms documents the breadth of influence exerted by the composer upon his contemporaries.

The second article in a three-part series on the sacred choral works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart presents an overview of the composer's settings for the Divine Office. A brief history and a summary of the musical structure of each work is presented.

An essay is presented that examines the early 19th century interest in the authorship of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Requiem in connection with the \"Kunstreligion,\" or art religion, movement that brought the idea of transfiguration into music criticism and played an important role in 19th century studies of the Requiem. Nineteenth-century analysis included a comparison of the composition to Raphael's \"Transfiguration of Christ\" and shaped debates about the authenticity of Mozart's composition. The essay explores this criticism that connected transfiguration and other aspects of Mozart's spirituality to the Requiem and traces the role of transfiguration in the reception of the composition.