The Last Cantata by Philippe Delelis

He hummed quietly. After finishing a bar, he fell back, breathless, against his pillows, and hummed what came next.
Requiem aeternam dona eis.
“If only I could rest,” he thought, picking up his writing case. Although his quill scratched busily, it could never keep up with his thoughts.
Outside was Vienna, his exuberant and ungrateful Vienna, bent on banishing the memory of the Turkish threat of 1683 by revelling in all the heady pleasures that life had to offer. The finest architects of the time, Fischer von Erlach, Hildebrand and Gabrielli de Rovereto, had given free rein to their imagination, transforming the Imperial capital into a rococo extravaganza. It was just before midnight. Lying in his bed, sweating so profusely that his night-shirt was sticking to his body, he could not afford to succumb to delirious fantasies, so he continued to write.
A new world of sound was taking shape beneath his quill, created from nothing; a work at once powerful and solemn, light-hearted and moving, which he himself explored as he sang. He produced a falsetto voice in imitation of the sopranos and knitted his brow as he tried to emulate the basses.
“Oh! This is so beautiful! I should’ve written it earlier. Only the Catholics understand anything about death!”
Lacrimosa dies illa.
He thought of Bach, a devout Lutheran, who had used the structure of the Roman Catholic liturgy for his masterpiece, the B Minor Mass.
“You knew that too, didn’t you, Johann Sebastian? Answer me, damn it!”
He fell back, racked with a fit of coughing. For two days, Vienna had been shrouded in fog, which had done nothing to ease his bronchitis. There was a thick fog that night. It was not the first time he had been feverish and confined to bed like this. He had often been laid low by the chilly air of the Wienerwald when returning home in the early hours of the morning, with or without Constanze.
Where on earth was Constanze?
“Constanze! Constanze!”
There was no answer. He remembered she was going to see the changes to the production of The Magic Flute at Schikaneder’s opera house. He looked at his watch, which he always kept within easy reach, and pictured the packed auditorium of the Freihaustheater. He knew the exact timing of his opera and could hear it in his head at exactly the same time as the musicians, singers and audience.
“It’s your turn to sing now, my magnificent Queen of the Night!”
He smiled when he thought how he had overturned the traditional symbolism of the musical registers by giving the high register to the forces of darkness and the low register to the forces of light. After all, light represented knowledge and wisdom. Music could convey many messages if you knew the right codes.
It occurred to him that Constanze might have stayed for a while with the company after the performance and, adding several notes to his score, he exclaimed:
“That must be it! We must bolster their morale! Drink to our health, Constanze, and especially to my recovery.”
Qua resurget ex favilla.
Each move he made was becoming a little more laborious. He wiped his perspiring brow and half closed his eyes.
“I’m so tired. But I must finish this. I know it’s foolish, but what if I died today. If I write the bass and vocal parts, what will they do with the strings? And if I compose the string parts, will they be able to work out the harmony? And anyway, I can’t compose the string parts, just like that, before the bass. That would be a first. But I can’t let them lumber me with melancholy violins. Just listen to me scrape horsehair across catgut! Back and forth! Long bow strokes. But if they were to drag them out even further. No! No! The music must be as light as possible, as graceful as the Mind of God!”
Another wave of despondency washed over him. His heart raced.
“Come on, old chap,” he said to himself, “There’s no point in rushing like this! I’m not that close to the finishing line!”
He sat up again painfully and wrote several more bars. He found it harder to raise his arm and dip the quill in the inkwell than to write the notes. He still had not solved his dilemma between bass part and instrumentation. He thought back nostalgically to the lessons he had received from his father. Their relationship had always been difficult. Leopold had not understood him and had never wanted to accept that he was no longer a child to be shown off to an awe-struck audience but a man impatient for the freedom to compose his own works. Even if that freedom had resulted in a frivolous and extravagant lifestyle that flouted the proprieties reserved for those who had time to respect them.
When did he realise that he was infinitely more talented than his father? Than all the musicians of his time? More talented, perhaps, than any other musician, past, present or future? Any? Perhaps not Bach? He thought about the fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier discovered at Baron Van Swieten’s house nine years ago, in 1782. He thought about their impact on him, dismissing similar works, like those by Eberlin and even Handel, as nothing more than “long-drawn-out voluntaries”.
He had immediately studied all these scores with enthusiasm. But he had learned the most important fugue much earlier, in 1764, in London.
He sighed and leaned back against his pillows.
“My eyes are so heavy. I’m falling asleep, but I mustn’t. Oh! If only I could regain the strength I had on the festivals of St Anne and at St Bridget! More than one Viennese woman remembers it, and the grounds of the Prater still blush at the thought! The good emperor—may he rest in peace—was right to give the Prater to the Viennese. He has earned his place in Paradise for that alone.”
Cheered by this thought, he sat up and got out of bed. He walked a few steps across the bedroom, holding his ribs as if he were trying to straighten his back, then headed for the living room. At the doorway, he looked around for something.
“Ah! There it is,” he said, catching sight of the carafe of Bohemian wine on the sideboard. He poured himself a glass, which he gulped down, followed by another.
“That’s better! Why don’t they give me this instead of medicine? I haven’t coughed once since I decided that wine might do me good! Right, I must get on!”
On his way back to the bedroom, he thought he heard a sound in the hallway. It was not his imagination, that was definitely the floor creaking. He stopped and called out:
“Is that you, Constanze?”
He was greeted by silence. He went back to his bedroom and climbed back into bed. He felt less tired and found it a little easier to breathe. He picked up his writing case and transcribed three bars after singing them fortissimo.
“What about you, Joseph?” he asked out loud, remembering the dead Austrian emperor. “Did you know the secret? No, of course you didn’t, but you could have.”
He wrote two more bars, singing the different parts.
“You’ll find out the secret along with everybody else. And they’ll find out about it because I’m going to tell them. Yes I am!”
Judicantus homo reus.
“That’s why I turned down the opera season in London. The journey would have been too tiring and, anyway, I already know London. My father used to parade me around everywhere as a child prodigy! How can I fault him for that? The small-mindedness and miserliness of wealthy noblemen taught me what to expect in the future. I should have agreed to do the London season. There’s money to be made there. No, no, I couldn’t. My work here is too important!”
His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the floor creaking again. He looked up.
His quill remained in mid-air, hovering between thought and paper.
The man in grey stood outlined in the door. He wore a mask over his face and a long floor-length cloak.
He took several paces forward and stopped at the foot of the bed.
“What are you doing here? How did you get in? I hope you haven’t come for the score, it’s not finished.”
As if to prove his point, he jotted down several more notes. “Too many notes!”–fortunately Joseph II’s gift of the Prater had made up for that stupid criticism.
“You can see I haven’t finished: I’m working on your Requiem; your master will be pleased. Oh! But Don’t tell me he couldn’t wait and that his funeral is taking place tomorrow at St Stephen’s. Talk about being in too much of a rush!”
His snort of laughter ended in a terrible fit of coughing.
The man in grey waited for him to stop and said calmly:
“I’m here about your funeral, not his, Maestro.”
He dropped his quill. His feeling of foreboding after his first meeting with the messenger had been well-founded. Death had commissioned the Requiem.
“What do you mean, my funeral? Don’t give me that! I’m only thirty-five! Bach died when he was sixty-five! I still have half my life to live, and so many works to write! I know it, they’re all in here, here!” he said, pointing to his head.
The man in grey left the foot of the bed, walked alongside it on the right and came to a stop, like an automaton.
It was not him. It was not the messenger. He had been taller, his movements more jerky, his mask different.
That was when he knew it was over.
You could joke with Death. You could talk to God. He had spoken intimately to God so many times through his music! But he could do nothing against an ordinary murderer.
Lacrimosa dies illa.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was buried in the early afternoon of 6 December 1791 at St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. His simple funeral ceremony bore the stamp of Joseph II’s reforms. His body was collected at 3 pm and, as legend has it, a snowstorm prevented anyone—including Constanze—from attending.
This snowstorm has, however, been thrown into doubt by historians, who base their reservations on Count Zinzendorf’s diaries. The entry for that date reads: “Clement weather. Three or four fogs per day for some tim [sic].” No-one made any note of the location of his pauper’s grave. Seven years later, when the city decided to carry out a survey of graves, there was no one left to remember where Mozart had been buried.