History and Reception of the historical Requiem version

At the end of Mozart’s life stands a composition that deals with death, the completion of which was interrupted by the death of its creator. This music’s after-life will never cease, not while the music itself is, in a sense, continually in the process of coming-to-be. Sixty years ago, Friedrich Blume in a 1961 essay entitled Requiem but no peace described the overall problem as “more confused than ever”.1 Scholars confronted with the literature on the Requiem come back again and again to this characterisation. Ulrich Konrad in 1994 (p. 65) spoke of “strata of historical rubble”;* Simon P. Keefe adds a note of popular culture to the debate by comparing the Requiem controversy to the film series The Godfather.2