W. A. Mozart: Requiem – Accentus

   in Early Music Today (Mar, 2015)
In July 1791 Mozart received an anonymous commission to write a requiem mass. Though he had contacted Mozart through an intermediary, the Austrian Count Franz von Walsegg wished the requiem to be a monument to the memory of his late wife, Anna. The same month Mozart had received another commission to compose the opera La clemenza di Tito for Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II’s coronation as King of Bohemia in Prague.

A few weeks before Mozart received these two major commissions, Leopold II’s aunt, the Queen of France Marie Antoinette, had tried unsuccessfully to escape from house arrest in revolutionary Paris with the rest of the French royal family. Before the …