About the Concert

T

he sixth annual Broomfield Choral Festival performance will feature W. A. Mozart's Requiem. The event is free and open to everyone.

Concert Date:

4:00 PM - August 28, 2011

Broomfield HS Auditorium

Rehearsals

Rehearsals will take place on Thursday evenings and Sunday afternoons in alternating weeks starting July 7 (Please see the rehearsal schedule on the Singers Page.)

 

 

Rehearsal Location:

All rehearsals will be held at the Church of the Holy Comforter, 1700 W. Tenth Avenue (located at the corner of Highway 285 and Tenth Avenue) in Broomfield, CO.

The dress rehearsal and the concert will take place at the Broomfield High School Auditorium.

Program Notes

In 1791, while in failing health, Mozart received a visit from a “mysterious” visitor who offered the composer a secret commission to write a Requiem for Count Walsegg-Stuppach. Apparently, the Count intended to perform the work in memory of his wife and to pass it off as his own composition. In need of funds, Mozart accepted the offer and the secrecy surrounding the dealings.

As his health continued to decline, Mozart felt a growing premonition that he was writing the Requiem for himself, and he rushed to finish it on his deathbed. Most accounts hold that on December 5, surrounded by several friends, he sang the alto part at an informal rehearsal, bursting into tears at the opening lines of the "Lacrimosa." Death snatched him shortly after midnight, about two months short of his 36th birthday. After his death, Mozart’s pupil, Franz Sussmayr — who probably knew Mozart’s style better than anyone — took on the responsibility of completing the work.

Of the Requiem, a contemporary of Mozart wrote, “Mozart has disclosed his whole inner being in this one sacred work, and who can fail to be affected ... [it] is unquestionably the highest and best that modern art has to offer to sacred worship.”  

Mozart filled the Requiem with his own distinct touches. The absence of the high wind instruments (flute and oboe) give the piece a dark and melancholy color, somber yet beautiful, rising to heights of power, drama and grace. He sets the “Kyrie” as a complex double fugue, brilliantly disguising the three-fold symmetry of the underlying prayer. He achieves an almost theatrical drama in the "Sequence," with its graphic descriptions of the Day of Judgment, by using frequent and abrupt changes in dynamics, tempo and mood.

Mozart also takes the opportunity for some exquisite musical imagery: the quavering bass line on the text, “quantus tremor est futurus” (what quaking there will be); the falling tears in the orchestral accompaniment to the "Lacrimosa;" and the unison octaves of the lion’s open mouth in the text “de ore leonis” (deliver them from the lion’s mouth) in the "Offertory."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, age 3, began by playing the keyboard. As a five-year-old, he composed minuets and at seven he played for Louis XV at Versailles and George III in London. It wasn’t until he was eight that he wrote his first three symphonies. When he died in Vienna in 1791, not having reached his thirty-sixth birthday, he left to the world a catalogue of works, which in size, variety, and mastery is the most prodigious in musical history. His music is considered to be the embodiment of the eighteenth-century Classical style.

One of the greatest prodigies in music history, Mozart had the good fortune to live at a time when tonality and harmony in western music had evolved to a level of purity and sophistication that makes the 18th century the envy of many composers born later. The less fortunate aspect of Mozart’s fate was to be born to an overbearing and ambitious father anxious to exploit his son's gifts.

Drama is the essence of Mozart. His music moves with an unparalleled grace and unveils its truths with suppleness and subtlety. He excelled in every form in which he composed. His contemporaries found the complicated emotional content of his music difficult to understand. Accustomed to the light, superficial style of rococo music, his aristocratic audiences could not accept the music's complexity and depth. Yet, with Josef Haydn, Mozart perfected the grand forms of symphony, opera, string quartet, and concerto that marked the classical period in music.

The tragic irony of Mozart’s life was that he won more acclaim as a boy wonder than as an adult musician. With his music labeled as too complicated and hard to understand, he spent his last years in a tragic struggle to achieve financial security for his wife and two surviving children. Upon his death from a feverish illness Mozart was buried in a Vienna suburb, with little ceremony and in an unmarked grave, in accordance with prevailing custom.

 

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