Mozart is full of loose ends and extremes. One-off miniatures, contextless and unparalleled, of singular profundity and perfection — the A-minor rondo and B-minor adagio for piano, the pieces for glass harmonica and mechanical organ, the Masonic Funeral Music; and four of his most ambitious-scaled monuments — two quasi-religious operas, Idomeneo taking seria into realms of extraordinary sublimity, Zauberflöte adding to these a further range of humanistic sentiment, comedy, pathos, slapstick; and two quasi-operatic religious works, both unfinished, the C-minor Mass and the D-minor Requiem, which equally take him into otherwise untried realms. Both were unwontedly personal, if hardly in a Romantic sense: the Requiem widely seen as his own swansong, the Mass a wedding gift to his bride Constanze, with a starring role for her soprano voice built in.
How to round them off rightly has exercised musicians ever since Mozart’s troubled deathbed. Rescue-work on the mighty Mass-torso had been begun by the composer himself, transforming it into an oratorio, Davide Penitente, for which some fine new numbers were added to the retexted liturgical movements. It has long seemed plausible to take these additions back towards the Mass they might have come from.
Latest so to do is the pianist and scholar Robert Levin. He has gone further yet, adapting extra fragments and sketches with skill and conviction into a performing score that completes the familiar liturgical framework with the size, splendour, high inspiration of what Mozart left. Its spirited performance towards the end of the Proms was a fitting climax to its celebration of the 250th birthday.
As always, it’s the Credo that presents the hardest challenge. This long text, unlyrical and undramatic, doesn’t walk into music like the brief, intense refrain-shapes of the Kyrie and Agnus Dei; even the relatively loose-knit Gloria presents a series of strong, telling contrasts, the stuff of compositional stimulation.
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