Hyperion Records

Probably as much for its being the harbinger of Mozart’s death as for its intrinsic value, Mozart’s last unfinished masterpiece, the Requiem, exercised the minds of many nineteenth-century composers, and its influence upon all of the great Requiem settings from Cherubini through Berlioz, Liszt, Verdi, Dvorvák and Fauré and on to many more recent works has been incalculable. Liszt confines himself to very clean accounts of the last two portions of the Sequenz: the powerful Confutatis, and the Lacrimosa, of which the textual evidence is that Mozart sketched only the first eight bars and Süssmayr completed it after Mozart’s death. (However, if Süssmayr did write the rest of it he did so in music of a quality which escaped him elsewhere, and it begs the question of what he, Mozart and others actually sang around Mozart’s death-bed when, as the biographers tell us, the Lacrimosa was sung.)

from notes by Leslie Howard © 1993