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CLASSICAL MUSIC
Mozart's
Requiem as Rorschach Test
Two
performances (by Britten and Mackerras) of two versions of the score (by
Süssmayr and Levin) offer utterly different experiences.
With
all the activity that Mozart's Requiem has inspired and continues to inspire,
among performers and scholars alike, one could make the case that the best
thing that ever happened to the piece was its having been left unfinished. All
the different editions of the score — from the commonly performed completion
by Mozart's pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr to the ostensibly pure-Mozart-only 1981
version by Richard Maunder to the innovative best-of-both-worlds 1996 version
by musicologist-cum-keyboard virtuoso Robert Levin — make the Requiem far more
ripe for reinvention than are more conventionally established masterpieces.
This is reflected in the two wholly different experiences delivered by these
two discs.
Composer/conductor
Benjamin Britten not only touched up the usual Süssmayr edition for the 1971
performance recorded here by the BBC, but, more significantly, he also uses
the piece as a
vehicle
for confessional outpourings that he never allowed himself in his own works.
Using Levin's anti-Süssmayr edition, Charles Mackerras tries (even more than
most "historically informed" interpreters) to divorce his interpretation from
all the Gothic Romanticism that has grown up around this work. Even amid the
Requiem's exhaustive representation in the catalogue, both these discs are
welcome — particularly now that so many older recordings seem, conceptually
speaking, to have gotten the piece wrong.
Since the Requiem is the single most
forward-looking piece in Mozart's output — and since, as a masterpiece left
unfinished by a dying composer, it was so appealing to the Romantic mindset —
it has inspired a Romantic-era performance practice that has often abandoned
common sense altogether when it comes to size. You'd expect a
fill-the-cathedral-with-sound approach from the piece's first-ever recording,
a 1941 reading by the Berlin Philharmonic and the Bruno Kittel Choir conducted
by Kittel himself. But even the normally elegant Karl Böhm favored a big,
woolly sonority for this score, a sound that seemed at odds with the music
itself even in the relatively unenlightened 1970s. Indeed, few Mozart works
have benefited as much as the Requiem from the recordings to come out of the
"historically informed performance" movement. Nearly all of those recordings
offer revelations of one kind or another — revelations that, intentionally or
not, Mackerras has consolidated.
His is one of
the cleanest recordings ever (though not to the antiseptic extremes of John
Eliot Gardiner, who practically makes the piece smell like rubbing alcohol). Mackerras'
tempos definitely move, but they never rush, and he always resists the
temptation to belabor the existential depths of Mozart's operatic
word-setting. Remove that bit of tradition and the vocal writing becomes, for
its time, surprisingly retro — the Kyrie's melismatic passagework, for
example, looks back to Handel. Besides making so much sense, the approach is
refreshingly musical. While some interpreters more or less give up on the
piece as Mozart's contribution is overtaken by Süssmayr's, Mackerras clearly
believes that a genuinely cohesive performance is possible with Levin's
version (which maintains more of Süssmayr's work than other modern editions
such as Maunder's).
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