TEHRAN – An Iranian orchestra will be performing Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Requiem tonight at Tehran’s Vahdat Hall to commemorate the artists who have succumbed to COVID-19 in the country.

Bardia Kiaras will conduct the orchestra, which will have Arsalan Kamkar as the concertmaster. The Hasmik Karapetyan Choir, Tehran Choir and Tonal Choir will also accompany the orchestra in the concert.

Over 30 celebrated Iranian artists, actors and filmmakers, including Khosro Sinai, Parviz Purhosseini, Changiz Jalilvand, Siamak Atlasi and Kambozia Partovi, have died from COVID-19.

Mozart composed part of the Requiem in Vienna in late 1791, but it was unfinished at the time of his death on 5 December of that same year. 

A completed version dated 1792 by Franz Xaver Süssmayr was delivered to Count Franz von Walsegg, who commissioned the piece for a requiem service on February 14, 1792 to commemorate the first anniversary of the death of his wife Anna, who died at the age of 20.

The autographed manuscript shows the finished and orchestrated Introit in Mozart’s own hand, and detailed drafts of the Kyrie and the sequence Dies Irae as far as the first eight bars of the Lacrymosa movement, and the Offertory. 

It cannot be shown to what extent Süssmayr may have depended on now lost “scraps of paper” for the remainder; he later claimed the Sanctus, Benedictus and the Agnus Dei as his own.

Walsegg probably intended to pass the Requiem off as his own composition, as he is known to have done with other works. This plan was frustrated by a public benefit performance for Mozart’s widow Constanze. 

She was responsible for a number of stories surrounding the composition of the work, including the claims that Mozart received the commission from a mysterious messenger who did not reveal the commissioner's identity, and that Mozart came to believe that he was writing the requiem for his own funeral.

In addition to the Süssmayr version, a number of alternative completions have been developed by musicologists in the 20th century.

Photo: A poster for a concert an Iranian orchestra will at Tehran’s Vahdat Hall in memory of Iranian artists who died from COVID-19.  
   
MMS/YAW