‘I’m Ready, My Lord’: Leonard Cohen and the Requiem He Wrote For Himself
In 1791, a “grey messenger” is said to have arrived at the doorstep of one of the greatest composers of his time, then 35-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The stranger commissions a Requiem — a musical liturgy for the dead — and swears Mozart to secrecy.
The mysterious client is an intermediary of Count Franz von Walsegg, who intends to use the piece for a memorial service of his late wife and who wants to pass it off as his own composition. But for Mozart, the Requiem takes on a much deeper, spiritual meaning — even though, or maybe, because he would never get to finish it. In the late fall of the same year, a strong fever overtakes Mozart. He dies in the early hours of December 5th, with — according to one eyewitness — the drum parts of the Requiem on his lips.¹
Later, contemporaries, among them Mozart’s wife Constanze, will claim that death himself had stood, shrouded in darkness, on the composer’s doorstep to ask for the piece. On his final day, Mozart is said to have accepted his “swansong” as his own damnation with the words: “Didn’t I say before that I was writing this Requiem for myself?”² Time would prove him right…
