Unfinished Masterpieces

February 12, 2012
Unfinished Masterpieces | Mozart’s Requiem and Schubert “Unfinished”

With Symphony in C and Rossen Milanov, Conductor

Alexandra Maksimova, soprano
Margaret Mezzacappa, mezzo-soprano
Zach Borichevsky, tenor
Scott Conner, bass
The program will include a Symphony in C performance of Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 “Unfinished”

Don’t miss this rare opportunity to hear two masterpieces, both of which are celebrated as breathtaking and unfinished works.  Mendelssohn  Club joins forces with Camden’s acclaimed Symphony in C in a joint program led by Maestro Rossen Milanov.

February 12, 2012 | 7:30 pm
The Church of the Holy Trinity, Rittenhouse
1904 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA
To hear Mendelssohn Club in Camden on February 4th, visit Symphony in C’s website.

Composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 – 1791).

There are few works in music which are as enshrouded in myth and legend as Mozart’s Requiem. The anonymous commission, Mozart’s sudden and untimely death while he was still working on the composition, and his morbid fantasy that he was writing the Requiem for himself is the stuff of legend and has been perpetuated by works as diverse as Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Mozart and Salieri and Peter Shaffer’s brilliant but historically inaccurate play Amadeus.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music. He is among the most enduringly popular of classical composers.

Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood in Salzburg. Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty. At 17, he was engaged as a court musician in Salzburg, but grew restless and travelled in search of a better position, always composing abundantly. While visiting Vienna in 1781, he was dismissed from his Salzburg position. He chose to stay in the capital, where he achieved fame but little financial security. During his final years in Vienna, he composed many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas, and portions of the Requiem, which was largely unfinished at the time of Mozart’s death. The circumstances of his early death have been much mythologized. He was survived by his wife Constanze and two sons.

Mozart learned voraciously from others, and developed a brilliance and maturity of style that encompassed the light and graceful along with the dark and passionate. His influence on subsequent Western art music is profound. Beethoven wrote his own early compositions in the shadow of Mozart, of whom Joseph Haydn wrote that “posterity will not see such a talent again in 100 years.”