Mozart Requiem

Mozart Requiem... Handel's Messiah

I wrote before how I found the fugues in Handel's "Messiah" and Mozart's "Requiem" strikingly similar - at least in their use of the falling diminished 7th interval.  With Handel, he set the words "And With His Stripes," a piece I was listening to a lot on my way to work today.

Mozart took Handel a step further in his Requiem during the "Kyrie."  He uses only a slightly altered rhythmic version of Handel's motif, but creates a double fugue with a second subject.  In the end it all fits so perfectly well together and seems inevitable as most great music does, yet as a composer myself, I marvel at this amazing feat of executing a very difficult task of creating a fugue let alone a double fugue.

Mozart pays homage to Handel, a man whose music he reorchestrated for "Messiah."  There can be no coincidence between Mozart's intimate familiarity with Handel's composition and the masterful "Kyrie" fugue in Mozart's "Requiem." 

Mozart Requiem... the Influence of Handel

After recently listening to Handel's "Messiah," I didn't realize how close the subject of "And With His Stripes" was to the fugue subject in Mozart's Requiem "Kyrie" section.  The notes, the intervals, are essentially the same.  There is only a slight rhythmic variation in Mozart's version, and it is clear he learned his lessons well from his re-orchestration project of Handel's "Messiah." 

Mozart used to be invited to music parties by the Baron van Swieten, who was a connisseur of Baroque music.  They would often play and listen to music of Bach, and it was Swieten who assigned Mozart the task of re-orchestrating Handel's "Messiah."  When I hear the homage Mozart paid to Handel while writing his "Requiem" and Mozart's own words of respect for the composer, I chuckle at the silly words Peter Schaffer put in the words of Mozart in his myth, "Amadeus."  When asked at a masquerade party to play Handel, Mozart said, "I don't like him."  Yet one more bad judgement by Schaffer.