Mozart’s Requiem – Live Review

Mozart’s Requiem, Vienna Karlskirche | 23rd June 2012

The gilded rays that grope outwards from the looming, sunburst tetragrammaton that banishes the clouds above the altar of Vienna’s Karlskirche celebrate far more than simply their intended function. Rather than the unceasing reach of יהוה, the altarpiece leaves the viewer struggling to fathom how such an obscenely opulent project occupies a space in which both the pinnacle of high Baroque and humility complement one another so tastefully. The entire church is a monument not only to the perfect vision of its architecht, Johann Bernard Fischer von Erlach and his son who took over the work after his father’s death, but each artisan who contributed to its completion. It is no coincidence that nearby sits the apotheosis of another age of art, the Jugendstil temple of the Secession building, whose motto (“To every age its art, to art its freedom”) seems foreshadowed by the total-art that is the Karlskirche. From the Greek portico and Roman columns of its frontage and the marble-and-gold Baroque interior the whole building is both gallery and work of art at one and the same time.

It was in this grandiose place of worship that I came to see a performance of Mozart’s Requiem. It is clearly fitting that a religious work should be performed in a place of worship but the collision of these two faith fuelled masterworks did not instigate any awe-inspiring thankfulness for a divine influence but, rather, humbleness in the face of sublime human achievement.

The Orchestra 1756 and Heinrich Biber Choir’s performance reached its peak in the Lacrimosa section of the Mass. This pinnacle, the quintessence of mournfulness in the Requiem, swooped and clung to the vaulted ceiling like the thick incense that would have accompanied its premiere as a funeral mass for the wife of Franz von Walsegg. Mozart’s own death midway through writing the Requiem has led many to see it as being written for himself and Miloš Forman’s excellent Amadeus romanticises this notion further, to the point where, in the very writing of the Requiem, Mozart is killing himself. Regardless of the mythology behind it and its funereal form, the Requiem is a piece of music which celebrates the joyousness that comes in the creation of something beautiful by human hands and this is never more apparent than with this meeting of musical and architechtural perfection.