The vast majority of my week was preparing for and performing Schicksalslied, Op. 54 by Brahms and the Levin completion of the Mozart Requiem, which has made me think about the nature of thought ownership.
Mozart died in 1791, before he could actually finish his Requiem. The Requiem was completed by one of Mozart's students, Süssmayr. Over the years, numerous other composers have tried to re-complete his work, based on scraps of notes left behind by the composer. One of the better known, more recent completions was done by Robert Levin, a noted musicologist and professor at Harvard. It was this completion that the AU Chorus and Orchestra performed this past weekend. The Levin completion is noticeably different from the traditionally recognized Süssmayr completion, with significant changes to the orchestration, and even an entirely new movement based on nothing but one scrap of paper and trends in composition at the time.
So, with all these changes, do we still really get to call it the Mozart Requiem? Sure, he was a musical prodigy, the kind that comes around every few centuries, and sure, he did compose the themes before his death, but how much of the work in its recognized modern state is actually still Mozart?
There is a problem on the other end as well. Süssmayr doesn't get much credit for completing the Requiem in its earliest and most widely recognized form. However, Levin gets to put his name just below Mozart's on the musical score. Functionally, Levin is only a bit more significant than an arranger. And yet, he has widespread notoriety in the classical music world because he changed up the ideas of a man long dead.
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