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Donald Macleod looks at the surviving glimpses of Mozart’s last months and their furious creative intensity.

Five years before Mozart’s premature death aged 35, the composer felt at the top of his game. He was performing regularly in Vienna and his music was beloved throughout the city. However, the Austro-Turkish War between the Habsburg Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire would soon have a negative impact on Mozart’s prospects, along with changing musical taste in the Austrian capital. The nobility had more important things to do than hold concerts and commission new music. Money was in shorter supply. As a composer for hire, Mozart had to change tack and write chamber music for publication and for performance in middle class homes, rather than concertos for the nobility.

The sheer concentration of Mozart’s creative efforts during his final year is hard to convey. From contemporary accounts we see a man consumed by his work. He never stopped composing, even in the midst of a game of billiards. He produced two ground-breaking operas during these months, finishing one in just 18 days. Mozart also wrote some of his most beloved music during this time, including the opera La Clemenza di Tito and his Clarinet Concerto. Plus, he received a commission for a new Requiem that remained shrouded in mystery until as recently as 1964.

Fantasia in F minor for mechanical organ, K. 608 (arr. for wind quintet)
Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet

La Clemenza di Tito, K. 621 (Act I: Quintetto con poro)
Anne Sofie von Otter (Sextus)
Catherine Robbin (Annius)
Sylvia McNair (Servilia)
Cornelius Hauptmann (Publio)
Júlia Várady (Vitellia)
Monteverdi Choir
English Baroque Soloists
John Eliot Gardiner, conductor

Clarinet Concerto in A major, K. 622
I. Allegro
II. Adagio
Michael Collins, clarinet
Russian National Orchestra
Mikhail Pletnev, conductor

Requiem in D minor, K. 626 (completed by F.X. Sussmayr) (Introit: Requiem aeternam; Kyrie eleison; Offertory: I)
Miriam Allan, soprano
Anne Buter, mezzo-soprano
Marcus Ullmann,
Martin Snell, tenor
Gewandhaus Chamber Choir
Leipzig Chamber Orchestra
Morten Schuldt-Jensen, conductor