count's wife had died, and he wished to be supposed to write a Requiem for her, and sent to commission Mozart with the composition, stipulating that he should resign the credit of its authorship to himself. The visit of the count's agent was attended with circumstances of great mystery. Mozart's anxieties had strongly predisposed him to the infection of an epidemic then prevalent, from which he was slightly suffering. This added to the depression of his spirits, which was the natural reaction of the over-excitement of his life at Schikaneder's; his imagination thus disturbed, he regarded the proposed commission as a preternatural warning, and he undertook it with the presentiment, that the Requiem he was to write would be for his own obsequies. So deeply interested was he in this new task, that he entered upon it while he was still busy with the "Zauberflöte," and the solemn earnestness with which he regarded it, is amply evidenced in the character of the two first movements. When these were finished, he had to lay both the opera and the Requiem aside, being invited, by the state authorities of Prague, to compose a work to celebrate the coronation of the emperor there, as king of Bohemia. The happy recollection of his success in that city, gave an irresistible charm to the invitation, and he undertook to write the opera of "La Clemenza di Tito," though there were but eighteen days for the accomplishment of the labour. He was met by Count Walsegg's agent as he was setting out for Prague, who pressed him to complete the Requiem, and this inopportune urgency strengthened his foreboding of his own fate being connected with that composition. He worked at the "Clemenza" in his travelling carriage, so brief was the time for its completion; and he intrusted the composition of the parlante recitatives throughout the opera to his pupil Süssmayer, who also wrote one small duet for it. On the 6th of September the work was performed, but it did not excite the enthusiasm which had greeted "Figaro" and "Don Giovanni" in the same place; and this added to the despondency which had been daily increasing in the composer. He returned to Vienna, finished his "Zauberflöte," and directed its first performance, on the 30th of September, when it was indifferently received. It grew in public favour, however, upon repetition, soon became very attractive, and was, before the end of a year, popular throughout Germany. Mozart now resumed the Requiem, to which his too truthful presentiment more and more inclined him; and he was especially delighted to be able to write down the recordare, in which movement he felt he had put forth the best he could produce. His illness increased so rapidly, that his physician forbade him to write, and ordered his score to be kept from him; but a transient improvement in his condition induced the relaxation of this injunction, and when once allowed to return to his work, he never again suffered his thoughts to wander from it. Süssmayer was continually with him, to whom he anxiously explained the effects he designed throughout the composition. So entirely was his mind concentrated upon this death song, that, in his last moments he assembled three singers by his bed-side, and with them, himself bearing the alto part, attempted a performance of the work; but his strength failed him before it was half concluded, and breaking down in the movement that begins "Lacrymosa," he was forced to discontinue it. Feeling the hand of death upon him, he begged that the event might be kept secret, until his friend Albrechtsberger could apply for the organistship at St. Stephens, which this would render vacant. His wife, whose weak health was exceeded by her weak mind, abandoned herself to helplessness, and she was utterly heedless of all that passed around her. Mozart was interred on the day following his decease, amid the fierce raging of a wintry storm. Thus none but the officials were present at the ceremony, and when his widow afterwards inquired where the remains of the greatest of musicians had been laid, a new sexton having been appointed in the interim, there was no one who could direct her to the spot; and this sacred place, which would have attracted the pilgrim steps of all art-lovers, has never been discovered.
Such was the too cruel end of one of the gayest, brightest, most generous, most happy-making, and most universally loving of men, whose heart was as large as his intelligence, and whose genius comprehended everything within the wide range of music. His personal character has been much traduced; but the careful and accurate researches into the circumstances of his career that have recently been made by Jahn and others, entirely free it from every stain, save only the one foible of improvidence. He had six children, of whom two survived him. The elder filled some government office for many years at Milan. The younger, Wolfgang Amadeus, was born on the 26th of July, in the year of his father's death; trained to his father's profession under the friendly care of Haydn, Neukomm, Streicher, and Albrechtsberger; came before the public as a composer and a pianist; and lived chiefly at Lemberg, little distinguished but by the name he inherited. The enormous amount of Mozart's productions in every department of music—for the church, for the theatre, for the concertroom, and for the chamber—in the very brief term of his life, is truly amazing; and when we consider how much of his time was occupied in playing and teaching, and how much also in amusement, we should be unable to credit this prodigious fertility, had we not the evidence of the works themselves to convince us. It is not, however, by the number, but by the excellence of his compositions, that this master advanced his art. How much is due to him of the unfolding of the principles of musical construction, is best proved, by a comparison of the works of Haydn that were written before this great master knew the productions of Mozart with those that were composed after he had watched the grand development of his own design in the labours of the man who was both his pupil and his teacher. The art of instrumentation, which is in music what colouring is in painting, owes to Mozart its birth and its perfection. Before his time, composers wrote for few instruments or for many, according as they intended their music to be soft or loud, but with little consideration of the various qualities of tone of the different elements of the orchestra. He keenly perceived the subtlest and the broadest diversity; and by contrasting and combining these, produced that beautiful alternation of effect, which is one of the leading distinctions between modern and ancient music, and founded a system that has been more or less modified by his successors, each according to his own individuality, but cannot be improved. It is, however, in the department of the opera, that music is most indebted to Mozart for its progress. With the nicest sense of dramatic propriety he always controlled the arrangement of his librettos, and thus we may ascribe to him the perfecting of the great finale, as first exemplified in "Figaro," and afterwards in "Don Giovanni" and "Cosi fan Tutte"—namely, a culminating portion of the action in which all the characters are opposed, set to a continuous piece of music that extends over several movements, and exhibits in relief and in union the chief elements of the drama. This is the grandest achievement in dramatic music, and this it is which advances the opera into the foremost grade of composition. The germ of such a design is indeed to be found in the comic operas of Logroscino, produced at Naples during the first half of the eighteenth century, which was considerably developed by his successor, Piccini; but the finales of Mozart are, dramatically and musically, so far in advance of anything previously written, and their form is so totally insusceptible of being surpassed, that the credit of having fully matured this chief feature in the construction of an opera is truly due to him.
A notice of Mozart would be incomplete, which gave no account of the disputes as to his authorship of the Requiem. That his wife, a practical musician, who was by his side all the time he wrought at this work, should have been totally ignorant on the subject, is lamentable, not to say culpable in the last degree. She could only state that she committed to Süssmayer, without examination, all the scraps and sketches that "ere found at Mozart's death, which he had made, contrary to his usual practice, in consequence of being prevented by his illness from completing each piece before he began to write it. Subsequently, Süssmayer handed her a copy of the work, of which some portions were written in Mozart's hand, and some in his own; and he forwarded another copy to Count Walsegg. The emperor, on learning that she was left in pecuniary difficulties, gave her a pension for life, and granted her the use of the court opera-house for a benefit concert, at which all the artists assisted gratuitously, and at which the Requiem was performed. The great interest it excited on this occasion induced many applications to her for transcripts of the score, and the work was publicly given at Leipsic and other places. The count's pretensions to the authorship were of course negatived by this production of the Requiem as Mozart's last composition; but he took no steps to bring the widow to account for her breach of contract, until the work was printed, when he instituted legal proceedings against her, which, however, he suppressed at the solicitation of Baron von Nissen (her second husband) and Abbé Stadler. In
