Requiem, K626, in Full Score (Dover Miniature Music Scores)

Contrary to popular fiction (Peter Shaffer's fanciful play Amadeus), there is no particular mystery surrounding the commissioning of Mozart's Requiem. A Viennese musical dilettante who was fond of ordering up music from established composers and then passing (or trying to pass) it off as his own work originally commissioned it. There's more question about how much of it Mozart composed in full or left sketches for, and how much his colleague Franz Sussmayer--asked by Constanze Mozart to complete the work--wrote on his own. Sussmayer, unsurprisingly, claimed a great deal for himself; Constanze averred that her husband had virtually completed the piece before his death and simply left the detail work to be done by another. Many later musicians have been highly critical of Sussmayer's additions, and several other notable composers, including Benjamin Britten, have tried their hands at finishing up and filling in Mozart's musical ideas.

Readers can play musical detective and decide for themselves just what Sussmayer contributed to the work--and how well he did it--with the aid of this full orchestral score from Dover, part of its new series of pocket-sized scores that offer convenient size and affordable prices. As is customary with Dover, this is a reprint of an out-of-print original from another publisher (in this case Breitkopf & Hartel), so it does not contain the most up-to-date musical scholarship, nor does it offer much in the way of informative notes on the music. Despite that, it remains a very useful tool for students and music lovers alike. --Sarah Bryan Miller