Bach set out with the intention of using his
art to communicate a certain feeling to his listeners; Mozart, when he
accepted the order for a Requiem from that mysterious messenger clad
in grey, thought only of creating a beautiful thing. But he had lately
found, to his great sorrow, that his ways were not the world's ways,
and fraught with even graver consequences was the world's discovery
that its ways were not Mozart's. Finding all attempts to turn him from
his ways fruitless, the world fought him with contempt, ostracism,
and starvation for weapons; and he lacked strength for the struggle.
There had been a time when he could retire within himself and live in
an ideal world of Don Giovannis and Figaros. But now body as well as
spirit was over-wearied; spirit and body were not only tired but
diseased; and when he commenced to work at the Requiem the time was
past for making beautiful things, for his mind was preoccupied with
death and the horror of death--the taste of death was already in his
mouth. Had death come to him as to other men, he might have met it as
other men do, heroically, or at least calmly, without loss of dignity.
But it came to him coloured and made fearful by wild imaginings, and
was less a thought than an unthinkable horror. He believed he had been
poisoned, and Count Walsegg's grey-clad messenger seemed a messenger
sent from another world to warn him of the approaching finish. As he
said, he wrote the Requiem for himself. In it we find none of the
sunshine and laughter of "Don Giovanni," but only a painfully pathetic
record of Mozart's misery, his despair, and his terror. It is indeed a
stupendous piece of art, and much of it surpassingly beautiful; but
the absorbing interest of it will always be that it is a "human
document," an autobiographical fragment, the most touching
autobiography ever penned.

The pervading note of the whole work is struck at the beginning of
the first number. Had Mozart seen death as Handel and Bach saw it, as
the only beautiful completion of life, or even as the last opportunity
given to men to meet a tremendous reality and not be found wanting, he
might have written a sweetly breathed prayer for eternal rest, like
the final chorus of the "Matthew" Passion, or given us something equal
or almost equal to the austere grandeur of the Dead March in Saul. But
he saw death differently, and in the opening bar of the "Requiem
aeternam" we have only sullen gloom and foreboding, d