W. A. Mozart - Requiem D Minor KV 626 (Robert D. Levin) | WDR Sinfonieorchester | Dima Slobodeniouk 

Gemessen am Durchschnitt war 35 ein extrem hohes Alter zu der Zeit.

@@sorenxoo3995 Diese Angabe ist unsinnig. Der Durchschnitt war deshalb so niedrig, weil sehr viele Kinder im ersten Jahr starben, siehe meine fünf Geschwister (von sechs) oder vier meiner Kinder (von sechs). Wer die ersten Jahre überstand, konnte auch damals ein respektables Alter erreichen.

Mich als den talentiertesten Musiker zu bezeichnen, fasse ich als Beleidigung auf.

Wenn man bedankt was alles heute über Mozart bekannt ist, ist er schon ein sehr Faszinierender Charakter bei den die grenzen zwischen Warnsinn und Genialität verschwommen.

Absolut! So furchtbar... !

Yeah.... And use the worst version ever made by Levin....... No comment

My God the more I listen to it the more it makes me puke..... What the hell was wrong with Levin????

And before any comment....... I played every single edition of Mozart compositions with the trombones.... And this one is the single piece that from time to time transforms in something that is NOT Mozart, conducting the trombone parts like something else.... Bah....

❤️

Ich komme aus Japan. Ich kann nicht Deutsch schprechen. Schreiben. Einbisschen. Ich muss Deutsch lernen. Englisch ist sehr schwierig.Mozart ist sehr gut. Sehr nett Musik.

😄

Dankeschön 😄

Göttlich

To be fair, Mozart didn't write most of this music. Only small parts of it. The rest was completed from very bare sketches (sometimes almost nothing) by Levin.

Danke für die netten Worte! 😊 Es freut uns sehr, dass es Ihnen gefällt und wir Ihnen, zumindest ein bisschen, durch die schwere Zeit helfen können.

Dankeschön 😊

@@WDRKlassik 🎶🎵😊

Agreed. I prefer Levin's version and I hope all orchestras will follow suit.

Levin is a longtime Mozart scholar and it shows. Most interesting of all he can emulate a Mozart fugue with relative ease, both the Amen and extended Hosanna fugues sound convincing enough to most people. That said however, there will never be any definitive version of the Requiem. Levin and others respectfully limit themselves to fix Sussmayr's score, not counting that in his time Sussmayr was aided by at least other 3 people. What we call "Mozart's Requiem" is an amalgamation of additions and corrections to Mozart's original score by many composers in a hurry to fullfill Count Walsegg's commision. All modern completions are essentially a new layer of corrections to the already convoluted original score, but it's also a very logical solution considering there is so little material on Mozart's hand from the Lacrimosa onwards. Levin's edition is solid overall but some aspects of it are a mixed bag for me, partly because he used Mozart's earlier Missa Brevis settings as a guide to his completion and he did not want to take any risks with recomposition. The Amen fugue is "aesthetically convincing" but it lacks the sense of baroque structure and symmetry that Mozart wanted in the work, since each major section was to end with a fugue, and the Sequentia being the longest section, then the Amen would've been set to a more elaborate fugue with modulations and subject mutations (pretty much like the Kyrie fugue) Levin instead composes a compact fugue without modulations, and at least for my ears, it doesn't bring much closure to the huge and magnificent Sequentia. The dull violins in the Sanctus and the voice leading in the Agnus Dei could've been better, too. I enjoy Druce's version a lot. Druce is more adventurous and not afraid to fully explore the possibilities of the Sussmayr source material. His recomposed Benedictus is excellent and stays true to the proportion and style that Mozart would've chosen for its main theme. The Requiem is an unfinished masterpiece, and unless it's not to be performed at all or only in its incomplete state up to the beginning to the Lacrimosa, it will always provide for new ways to be interpreted, recomposed and performed. It's one of the many reasons why I love this work so much.

@@VexaS1n “was aided by at least other 3 people”. This is technically true albeit a misleading statement in the sense that 3 composers didn’t work on the Requiem simultaneously. First, the complete orchestration for the Kyrie fugue was elaborated by Jakob Freystadtler for the funeral of Mozart. Then Constanze - still bound by the contract of Count Walsegg mind you - gave the manuscript to two other people *before* Süssmayr, the 26-year old Joseph Eybler and Maximillian Stadler, neither of whom could add anything substantial to the Requiem besides some orchestration scribble here and there before ultimately giving the manuscript back. Constanze didn’t choose Süssmayr initially because in her own words she was resentful towards him at the time (some say she was suspicious about Süssmayr’s growing affiliations with Salieri, then court-composer, who we all know and cherish). Freystadtler, Eybler and Stadler’s work on the Requiem amounts to almost nothing but filling some trivial orchestration parts and that two measure “huic ergo parce deus” scribble in the Lacrymosa Druce foolishly utilised in his completion that has nothing to do with Mozart. Süssmayr almost rewrote/reorchestrated the entire thing these guys did on the Requiem. I tried really hard, but I can’t help but be unimpressed and unconvinced by the Benedictus completion of Druce: it’s like he’s trying to aggressively communicate a point by overextending when all we needed was just some simplification of Süssmayr’s heavy-handed, bombastic writing and crude basso. The material is already Mozartean and sometimes, less is more. I disagree about the need for “adventurousness”, Mozart would have never used such overambitious modulations as some of the other completions do nor would have he utilised so much extra material in a rigorous church fugue that was strictly archaic in form and approach even for its day. And I have to echo Christoph Wolff on this one: Süssmayr has one inalienable advantage over all of us: he was there on the spot, in the immediate atmosphere so to speak possibly even receiving instructions from the man himself. Some musicologists even proposed that he worked off sketches because the *core* of the remaining three movements are such quality Süssmayr could not have produced unaided, who was a second-rate composer as evident from his own compositions. I particularly don’t understand your complaints about the “dull” violins in the Sanctus. Süssmayr’s original parts (with the violinists sawing on ugly repeated notes) are terrible even if we don’t account for the voice leading error, Levin thus provided an elegant solution, celebratory in nature as it should be, based off the K. 427 Mass. And you have to admit, it’s very hard to model your work after anything but Mozart’s lesser masses when his two greatest major sacred works have been left unfinished as a torso (the 427 likely for monetary reasons). Don’t forget, extensive research has conclusively proven that the conceptions of structure and hierarchy in Mozart’s music has already been formed in him when he composed his earliest examples in a given genre.

@@Kris9kris Kris, have you listened to the recent Requiem completion by Mr. Michael Ostrzyga? I have listened to it all... Levin,Druce,Maunder,Cohrs,etc... But Ostrzyga is the most historically accurate and Mozartean edition in recent time! His new SANCTUS in d minor was so convincing that I thought Mozart's original sketch was finally discovered and Ostrzyga transcribed it down. What drama, what passion! He also adds Pizzicato strings in the Benedictus, almost predicting romanticism!!! Safe to say, Ostrzyga will equal (or even surpass) Levin's edition in number of performances. I'm sorry, but Levin's timid scoring, using Missa Brevis models simply doesn't have the fire and intelligence of late Mozartean writing.

@@VexaS1n I listened to Osztryga, and I’m sorry, I don’t see myself buying highly conjectural completions of this piece anymore as there is already an obnoxious overabundance of them: they are IMO nothing more than an exercise in self-actualisation, clout chasing and sometimes deliberate provocation on the part of the completionist. There are too many snake oil salesmen in this cottage industry who see themselves as non-falsifiable prophets when it comes to the “composer’s true intentions” and the result is more often than not completely at odds with the style they’re working with when you look into it empirically. Levin summed up this pretty perfectly: with what authority can we know what Mozart would have done? The answer is: nothing. At least he kept what we *know from evidence* Mozart sounds like and discarded what it doesn’t. And if it resembles some Salzburg masses, so be it, that’s not the point. He doesn’t claim he knows what Mozart would have done because you have an impossible mission on your hands if you work with that presupposition. Think of it this way: you finish a building left as a torso aka. incomplete in the 18th century, but you don’t have the exact materials those old craftsmen worked with. WYD? Do you claim you have the access to the exact ingredients, or do you reproduce the *feel* of those old components with modern ones to the best of your ability? If you do the first, you would be utterly dishonest. I feel like the supermajority of these modern completionists don’t engage with the broader research because they don’t feel they need to. Their confidence and intuition as self-proclaimed composers are all it takes them: for me, their amendments stick out like a sore thumb as a result of it. Plus, we have to give some credit to Süssmayr and the performance tradition - as I said, he was there on the spot, he most likely received instructions, there is no point in changing anything of his unless it demonstrably clashes with Mozart’s well-documented practices. He’s the most researched and talked about composer in all of history after all. If you prefer Osztryga, more power to you, but if you ask me what *sounds like* Mozart, I would say Levin… then Süssmayr. My scorching hot take is that leave the damned Requiem alone - preferably until new sketches turn up. With that much energy, Cohrs and other such completionists could have written entirely new pieces, and that’s what the utterly dying classical music scene *needs* right now, not patchwork.

Thank you! 🤗

Merci beaucoup 🤗

100% agree. I'm trying to pull this off RU-vid as I prefer it over most other versions. I also love being able to look and see where each tidbit of sound comes from. Very great performance and that woman has a beautiful voice.

The Amen at the end of Lacrimosa is not a variation but a completion of Mozar's originally intended but uncompleted Amen Fugue which Sussmayr had omitted in his completion. That's why it is not normally played.

For reference this is the Robert Levin edition of Mozart's Requiem. He's a Harvard music professor who finished the mass with instrumentation that theoretically would have fit Mozart's mass better than the more commonly performed Sussmayr edition.

@@EarlJoseph-violinist nobody kmows for sure, what Mozart originally intended. This is only one of unproved theories. I am sustantially pleased with Sussmayers completion.

Why not? There's no reason for such glorious music to be lugubrious.

Grazie!

No

ich glaube, dass Sie nichts von klassischer Musik verstehen. Denken Sie mal nach....

I respect your point of view, but no deal ... if you see the composing Year of the Masterpiece, you will find something about 1780-1790... the earlier settings, at least, seems to be more appropriate... gave us the joy to know something "welches freien uns von Süssmayr scheiss... was denkest du?" I had to wait for almost 300 years to find someone that has Breast to do this... but I understand the appeal of the "Falsely Named" (apócrifa) finish done by a classmate of Mozart... auf wiedersehen!

@@adolfdeutschmann9228 , genau so!

Totalmente de acuerdo,los tempi muy ligeros no son propios de una misa Mozart decidió no incluir la fuga en el Lacrimosa, pero este señor se arroga el derecho de hacerlo ? Mil veces mejor la versión Sussmayer,que en definitiva conoció a Mozart y solo por eso ocupa un lugar que la "pretendida" relevacia de Levin jamás alcanzará. Mas respeto sr levin, incluida la partitura incoclusa...

Totally agree, very light tempi are not typical of a mass Mozart decided not to include the fugue in the Lacrimosa, but does this man claim the right to do so? A thousand times better the Sussmayer version, which ultimately met Mozart and for that reason alone it occupies a place that the "pretended" relief of Levin it will never reach. More respect mr levin, including the unfinished score

The fact is that Mozart had only written just 8 bars of Lacrimosa -- the rest is a reconstruction. Here the reconstruction by Levin is presented. It is based on Mozart's manuscript (Amen fugue) found later on in his papers.

I can totally but understand your frustration - Sussmayr's Lacrimosa is totally embedded in western culture and is an absolute classic despite its occasional voice leading problems. However, the edition in question (by Levin) tries to have the traditional version a little closer to Mozart's intentions, given that Mozart wanted an Amen fugue, he had to remove that big Amen at the end of the movement. Nonetheless, there are other editions that have the Lacrimosa pretty much untouched (Andrews, Beyer, Landon, etc.).

@@OsGamersdoBrasil Well said. The Sussmayr version has been recorded so many times that listeners either forgot or just never knew that what they were hearing was not all Mozart.

@@redbrian3655 , this is the point... when we hear the Lacrimosa we must think of a double solution: or we lie to ourselves and end on preferring what is NOT Mozart, or we try to think how Mozart COULD have done... and to me, it's mostly honest (respected the contrary opinions) the second solution... there's a lot of unfinished works all over the time... but nobody tried till now to finish the last fugue of the "Kunst der Fuge" by Bach... no one has even tried to think on this... because it's not possible. So the Requiem will ever keep unfinished, but Mozart has material enough to give any adventurers a minute of "dream"... let's give them the benefits of the doubt at all! I think it's highly uncertain that Süssmayr had received some instruction by Mozart himself... too difficult to us nowadays... difficult as well to a classmate of Mozart to understand double or triple fugues... I repeat: THAT'S the point!

De acuerdo con su opinión, no solo frustra el Lacrimosa, sino que además es una falta de respeto.

Thanks for your comment!

Dein Pech wenn du dieses Meisterwerk nicht verstehst! Hör auf Hate zu verbreiten und schau dir nicht solche Göttlichkeit an wenn du so etwas eh nicht magst !!

@@LSW501 Sie checker😅🙄... . Ich finde es, anders beschrieben, echt grün hinter den Ohren und requiem-fern. Manchmal gibt's auch Schönes dabei, zum Glück. Drin sitzen hätte ich trotzdem nicht wollen.

Wie sollen sie anders, bei dem Dirigenten? Da kann sich niemand Einfinden.

@@111jwfh das Schlimmste sind immer die staatlichen Institutionen, das sind Beamte, die sich als Musiker ausgeben 🤣