Mozart's Starling

by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

In July of 1791, before the onset of his sickness, Mozart was approached by an anonymous stranger and engaged to compose a requiem for the wife of an illustrious Viennese gentleman. The commission was generous; Mozart accepted, began the work, then set it aside to complete La clemenza di Tito for the coronation of Emperor Leopold II in Prague. It sounds apocryphal. Mozart, unknowingly near his own death, is drawn into a prescient, ghostly commission by a shadowy figure who in some biographies wears a dark hood. And yet it is true. The stranger was an emissary of Count Franz von Walsegg, whose wife, Anna, had been only twenty-two years old when she’d died suddenly in February. (The seeming Victorian-Gothic depiction of the emissary in the story—gaunt, hooded, and shadowy—was actually an accurate description of Walsegg’s courier Franz Anton Leitgeb, who was tall and thin with a taciturn disposition and a dark Turkish complexion and who always dressed in gray.) It is likely that Mozart knew both the count and his young wife, as Walsegg often invited the Viennese cognoscenti to his country home for music. One of the reasons Mozart was approached anonymously might have to do with the count’s proclivity to commission music and then to pass the work off as his own. When guests would ask about the composer of a piece that had been performed in his parlor, Walsegg is known to have asked them to guess. And when the response was a polite “Well, it sounds like it could have come from ...