Requiem in D Minor, K. 626 (Lacrimosa)

Mozart died before he finished it. That's the fact that everything else orbits. On December 5, 1791, at approximately one in the morning, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in his Vienna apartment at the age of thirty-five, leaving the Requiem in D Minor incomplete — specifically, he had finished the vocal parts and bass lines through the Lacrimosa, the eighth section, and sketched fragments of several more. His student Franz Xaver Süssmayr completed the rest, using Mozart's sketches and, presumably, a level of anxiety that would hospitalize a modern person.

The circumstances of the commission are the stuff of legend, and like most legends, they're about sixty percent true. A messenger did appear at Mozart's door in the summer of 1791, dressed in grey, requesting a requiem mass and refusing to identify his employer. The employer turned out to be Count Franz von Walsegg, an aristocratic amateur musician who had a habit of commissioning works anonymously and then passing them off as his own compositions. Mozart didn't know this. He became convinced he was writing his own death mass, a belief that his declining health did nothing to dispel.

The Lacrimosa is where Mozart's pen stopped. Eight bars of choral writing — 'Lacrimosa dies illa' — that day of tears — in a weeping, descending figure that ranks among the most emotionally devastating passages in all of Western music. Süssmayr completed the movement, and the seam between Mozart's writing and his student's is audible to scholars but invisible to the grieving. When you hear the Lacrimosa at a funeral, the tears don't check attribution.

Mozart was buried in a common grave, as was standard practice in Joseph II's Vienna. No headstone. No marker. Constanze didn't attend the funeral — she was too ill, or too distraught, or both. The location of his remains is unknown. The man who could compose a symphony in his head while playing billiards, who wrote his first composition at five and his first opera at eleven, who left behind over six hundred works in thirty-five years, is somewhere under a Viennese cemetery with no name on the stone. The Requiem is the headstone the ground never received.