The Commission During the summer of 1791 – some five months before his death – Mozart was anonymously commissioned to compose a Requiem Mass: a mass for the dead. More than any other single element, it was this anonymous commission that helped to later fuel the myth that Mozart had, in fact, been murdered. In 1829, 38 years after his death, Mozart’s widow Constanze was interviewed by an English music publisher named Vincent Novello and his wife, Mary. Constanze purportedly told the Novellos that: “Some six months before his death he was possessed with the idea of his being poisoned – ‘I know I must die’, he exclaimed, ‘someone has given me aqua toffana and has calculated the precise time of my death – for which they have ordered a Requiem. It is for myself that I am writing this.’” (For our information, “aqua toffana” is a colorless and tasteless mixture containing arsenic, antimony, and lead that was invented in Naples in the seventeenth century as a cosmetic. However, we are told that young women used it quite successfully as a poison, young women “who wished to hasten the arrival of widowhood.”) Back to Constanze Mozart’s assertion, made 38 years […]
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