Benjamin Franklin popularised an older saying that there are only two certainties in life: death and taxes.  No one to my knowledge has written music about taxes or their effect on human life, but many pieces of music have death as a theme, or as a driver in their composition.

It just so happens that we are singing one such piece at present, Mozart’s Requiem.  Death permeates the work.  It sets to music the words of the Catholic Mass for the Dead; it was commissioned to by a nobleman to commemorate the very premature death of his beloved wife; and in the later stages of its composition the composer must have been aware that the chances of his recovering from a severe infection were very low.  All this shows in the powerful setting of the words, where the music lights them up and colours them to reflect their deep meaning.  There are angry sections, times of pleading, moments of sheer awe, and portents of eternal rest.

I was fortunate to hear two other pieces of music recently with deathly connotations.  Firstly, the SSO played Mahler’s 10th Symphony, which was incomplete when he died at the age of 51, Like Mozart, he was at the peak of his compositional powers, and, like Mozart, his illness was the sort of infection which nowadays would almost certainly be treatable with antibiotics.  Whereas in Mozart’s case, Sussmeyer had to complete the harmony and word setting of almost half of the work, in the case of Mahler’s 10th, the short score was complete.  Deryck Cooke’s role was to orchestrate the short score, using his knowledge of Mahler’s other symphonies.  It is a fascinating work, as usual with Mahler covering a whole gamut of emotions.  There is, for example, a huge orchestral scream in the first movement, but this is said to represent not a view of death but Mahler’s anguish his own shortcomings leading to his wife’s infidelity.  The symphony ends with the scream again, but then dissolves into a love song which, despite hints of bitterness, is compellingly beautiful.

Then there is Schubert’s string quartet “Death and the Maiden.” This was played stunningly by the Australian Chamber Orchestra with the score augmented to fit – a format which does not always succeed but which worked extraordinarily well on this occasion.  Schubert composed a song based on the elegant short poem “Death and the Maiden” early in his career.  In the poem, death is not a masculine entity authoritatively summoning someone to his presence but rather a feminine voice inviting someone to a happy occasion, seemingly even with the option to refuse.  Then towards the end of his life – and in this case he completed the work and it is likely that he knew that he did not have much longer to live – he used the feeling of the poem to inspire this string quartet.  Each movement has a theme in a major key representing life and one in the minor representing death, and right at the end of the last movement the music oscillates so rapidly between major and minor keys that you can imagine Schubert wrestling hard with contrary feelings about his own situation.

Listening to these two pieces of music highlights the intense feeling and meaning of both words and music in Mozart’s Requiem, features which no doubt Carlos will draw out in rehearsal as we make final preparations for our own performance of this amazing work.

Wasn’t it great to sing through the whole of the Requiem last night?

It always sends a chill down my spine when we finally get everything sufficiently together for Carlos to have us sing through the entire work, even if, as last night, we did not start at the beginning.  It makes you realise what a great piece of music we have the privilege of singing.   It emphasizes our good fortune at singing it under a conductor with such a deep understanding of the music, and what’s more, the willingness and ability to share his musicality with us Choir members.

Carlos’ enthusing last night about the meaning of the words behind the music made me  check out the libretto again.  It’s stern stuff in places – Day of wrath, day of anger will dissolve the world in ashes. It’s triumphant at times – The trumpet will send its wondrous sound and gather all before the throne.  At many points in the score there is pleading – Lord have mercy on us; Grant them eternal rest O Lord.  And, as Carlos says, the music reflects and colours the words at every turn.

It’s good to know that we have a few more weeks to polish the corners which may be a bit rough at present.  And if we do that well, this will be yet another concert which will send the audience home inspired by the music and impressed by our musicianship.

There was not much time for musing at last night’s rehearsal.  Carlos kept us very busy, focusing in particular (and with more than a little justification) on us basses.  I hope we were singing more in tune at the end of the evening than we were at the beginning!

However, earlier in the week I heard something which really set me thinking.  After playing the well-known Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor, Russell Torrance of ABC Classic FM calmly announced that nobody knows whether this work was actually composed by JS Bach himself, by one of his musical family, or by one of his pupils.

Really?  And then I remembered that not long ago someone had cast doubt on the true composer of the Bach Solo Cello Suites, citing evidence that they may have been penned by one of Bach’s wives, Anna Magdelena.

It is a not uncommon situation.  We are currently preparing to sing a work whose composition is shrouded in some mystery, and yet we still call it Mozart’s Requiem.

Next week, Anne and I go to hear Deryck Cooke’s completion of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony.  Unlike poor old Sussmeyer, who seems to receive little credit for completing Mozart’s Requiem, Deryck Cooke is always given programme billing – maybe because, although his is the most frequently performed, there are alternative versions.

And then there is Elgar’s Third Symphony.  Elgar wrote most of the first movement and sketched out the remaining movements, so this is always billed as Edward Elgar: the sketches for Symphony No 3 elaborated by Anthony Payne – long winded but accurate.

These are all wonderful pieces of music, whatever their attribution, and well worth listening to.  In contrast, a few months ago I watched a TV programme about trying to decide whether a  painting was really the work of one particular old master.  It was fascinating, because it seemed that the proof depended on every single brush-stroke being quite definitively the work of the old master himself.  One stroke by someone else, however close to the old master, would render the painting inauthentic, reducing its artistic integrity, and thus its value, by a considerable margin, however beautiful it might be.

So in one art form, painting, attribution is everything.  And in ours, music, a more expansive view is taken.  And a good thing, too, or we might not have the thrill and satisfaction of listening to and singing many pieces of doubtfully attributed, but nevertheless wonderful, music.

It is Friday morning. I am sat at the computer keyboard wondering what to write about this week.  Rehearsal was so busy for all of us yesterday that there was not much time for musing.

I could follow up last week’s article about whether melody or harmony come first to a composer (in the case of the definitive opening chords of Regina Coeli it is definitely the harmony, but later on the sublime solos must have surely started with the melody).

I could say something about the wonderful concert of vocal and orchestral music by Tallis, Purcell, Byrd, Gibbons and their contemporaries we heard last week courtesy of the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra and Choir.

Or perhaps I should re-inforce Roger’s point last night about how much just a few minutes of preparation during the week pays enormous dividends in confidence and poise at the subsequent rehearsal.

“Help!” comes a call from the kitchen, completely breaking any nascent chain of thought that might have been brewing in my befuddled brain. .  “We can’t get into the laundry!  The door from the outside is locked on the inside and the door from the kitchen won’t open!”

Half an hour later, back at the keyboard, having avoided breaking into the laundry by remembering that there is an outdoor door key hidden for just such an emergency, and having disassembled and re-assembled the recalcitrant door handle mechanism, I am left musing whether the great creative geniuses (and that is the correct spelling according to yesterday’s SMH crossword puzzle) had to deal with these mundane situations, and if so how they dealt with them.  Can you imagine, for example, Mozart  helping Constanze with the washing up, or Beethoven clearing a blocked drain?  And yet I suppose that all these people had to cope with the everyday business of life just as we all do.

It’s a sobering, and perhaps a somewhat comforting, thought.

Did you watch any of the recent Winter Olympics?  Anne and I did not catch much of the coverage, but were very impressed by some of the newer (for us) disciplines with contestants alternately skiing down precipitous slopes and then jumping huge vertical distances, in seemingly endless sequences and all at breakneck speed.  It seemed a bit like a skiing roller coaster.

Carlos spent a lot of time with the sopranos at last night’s rehearsal.  Not that the rest of us were better than them, but rather that they are called upon by Mozart to be vocal skiers of the most modern sort.  The Kyrie in D minor in particular has some very tricky sections for them.  They start on a high note, slip gently and securely down a few adjacent notes, then have to jump nimbly down several notes, land securely and quickly gather poise to leap up, either in one jump or by a series of notes, towards the top again.  And then it starts all over again, but not exactly the same; similar in principle but very different in detail, and often seemingly at a skier’s breakneck speed.  It’s demanding stuff and they did well to have pretty well mastered it by the end of the rehearsal.

During the basses’ down-time, listening to the sopranos, it was easy to fall into musing – which came first for Mozart, the melody or the harmony?  For some composers, we know the answer.  Elgar, for example, carried a music manuscript notebook with him all the time.  As he walked and cycled around the Malvern Hills a melody would come to him; he would jot it down and, once back home in his study, refine it and add appropriate harmonies.  Incidentally, his music manuscript books were made by his wife Alice.  She had a five-nibbed pen for drawing musical staves, and she laboriously drew up all Edward’s manuscript paper with this pen, a ruler and of course, do you remember it, ink.  Quite a remove from the days of composing software!

For Mozart, we do not know the answer.  I sensed last night that it might be a bit of both.  Sometimes the flow of the melody seemed to dominate and to determine the harmony.  At other times it seemed that Mozart wanted to use a particular sequence of chords, particularly when moving from key to key, and then found a tune which made the most of them.  And maybe sometimes, being the genius he was, he thought of them both at the same time.

We will never know what fired Mozart’s great creative genius.  All we can do is to enjoy the fruits of his labours, and make the most of the opportunities we have to share his brilliant creativity with the members of our audiences.