This Moment (World premiere; This Moment was commissioned by the League of American Orchestras with the generous support of the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation)

Symphonic Commissioning Project

Anna Clyne is a native of London but has lived elsewhere for much of her career: in Scotland for her schooling at the University of Edinburgh, then in the United States, where she earned a master’s degree in composition at the Manhattan School of Music and gained attention for music of unusual breadth and vibrancy. A statistical report of international concert music from the online publication Bachtrack showed that she was the world’s eighth-most-performed contemporary composer in 2022. During the 2022/23 season she was composer-in-residence with the Philharmonia Orchestra and the Trondheim (Norway) Symphony, and this coming season she begins in the same capacity with the Helsinki Symphony. These are the most recent of residencies that in preceding years have also included the Chicago Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, Orchestre national d’Île-de-France, and Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

In 2015, her composition Prince of Clouds, for two violins and orchestra, was nominated for a Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition, and in 2016 she was awarded the Hindemith Prize by the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival in Germany. She collaborates on cross-genre creative projects, including with filmmakers, visual artists, and choreographers, having provided music for works at the Royal Ballet in London and the San Francisco Ballet. She often writes pieces in reaction to specific visual artworks and to pieces by canonical composers, which serve as points of departure or as material for musical commentary. So it is with her new, five-minute program opener This Moment, which incorporates themes from Mozart’s Requiem and is presented here as a prelude to that work. She writes: This Moment is inspired by the writing of Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Zen Master, and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, who passed away in January 2022 at the age of 95. It is a reflection on his words “this moment is full of wonders.”

“The meditation on death is a very important meditation. When you meditate on death, you love life more, you cherish life more. We can learn many lessons from it.”—TNH

This Moment is also a response to our collective grief and loss in recent years, and borrows two moments from Mozart’s Requiem: [From the first movement], Requiem—an ascending chromatic line in the sopranos and the fugal subject that is introduced with this line in the basses; [and from] Lacrimosa—the instrumental introduction from the seventh movement.

Requiem, K. 626
I. Introit: Requiem aeternum
II. Kyrie
III. Sequence: Dies irae
     Tuba mirum
     Rex tremendae
     Recordare
     Confutatis
     Lacrimosa
IV. Offertory: Domine Jesu
     Hostias
V. Sanctus
VI. Benedictus
VII. Agnus Dei
VIII. Communion: Lux aeterna Cum sanctis tuis in aeternum

In the summer of 1791, the 35-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was short on cash but far from destitute, accepted a commission to compose a Requiem. The offer was tendered by an emissary from Count Franz von Walsegg-Stuppach, a wealthy music lover who may have known Mozart personally through musical or Masonic connections. The messenger apparently did not disclose who was making the offer; we do not know if Mozart guessed. The Count’s wife had died on February 14, at the age of only 20, and he had decided to memorialize her through a Requiem that would be performed annually on the anniversary of her passing.

Mozart took half of his fee as a down payment and then put the project on hold so he could tend to the more immediate demands of two operas that were headed to their premieres, La clemenza di Tito and Die Zauberflöte. Only in the autumn could he focus on the Requiem, its structure being dictated by the traditional Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead. But around November 20 he fell ill, and he died at about one o’clock in the early morning of December 5. He had made considerable headway with the Requiem, but plenty remained to be finished. As his health grew precarious, he dictated ideas about how the piece should be completed to his pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr.

When Mozart died, the Requiem was more-or-less finished through the beginning of the Lacrimosa, with much of the Offertory also written. There was a compelling practical reason that it should be brought to a finished state: Count Walsegg had paid a fair amount of money into the project already, and Mozart’s widow, Constanze, needed the funds that the remainder of the commission would provide. She arranged for Süssmayr to compose the uncompleted Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei sections (perhaps drawing on ideas Mozart had shared with him); for the Communion he simply repeated music Mozart had completed for the Introit and Kyrie.

Süssmayr’s completion entered the canon as the standard edition, but quite a few scholars have proposed competing versions based on divergent opinions about how to finish the piece in a more Mozartian style. This performance uses the version published in 1971 by Franz Beyer, a specialist in completing unfinished works of the Classical era. He used Süssmayr’s edition as the basis, feeling that it had the authority of residing closest to the composer—and, furthermore, arguing that Mozart had left a personal imprint on more of the Requiem than had been previously supposed. But he adapted the score substantially, particularly revising Süssmayr’s dark-toned orchestration, making it lighter and, as he wrote, aiming “to color it with the hues of Mozart’s own palette.”