eadly fear
begotten of actual foreknowledge of things to come. The discord at the
fifth bar seems to have given him the relief gained by cutting oneself
when in severe pain; and how intense Mozart's pain was may be
estimated by the vigour of the reaction when the reaction comes; for
though the "Te decet hymnus" is like a gleam of sweet sunshine on
black waters, the melody is immediately snatched up, as it were, and,
by the furious energy of the accompaniment, powerful harmonic
progressions, and movement of the inner parts (note the tenor
ascending to the high G on "orationem"), made expressive of abnormal
glowing ecstasy. To know Mozart's mood when he wrote the Requiem is to
have the key to the "Kyrie." His artistic sense compelled him to veil
the acuteness of his agony in the strict form of a regular fugue; but
here, as everywhere else in the Requiem, feeling triumphs over the
artistic sense; and by a chromatic change, of which none but a Mozart
or a Bach would have dreamed, the inexpressive formality of the
counter-subject is altered into a passionate appeal for mercy. In no
other work of Mozart known to me does he ever become hysterical, and
in the Requiem only once, towards the end of this number, where the
sopranos are whirled up to the high A, and tenors and altos strengthen
the rhythm; and even here the pause, followed by that scholastic
cadence, affords a sense of recovered balance, though we should
observe that the raucous final chord with the third omitted is in
keeping with the colour of the whole number, and not dragged in as a
mere display of pedantic knowledge. The "Dies Irae" is magnificent
music, but the effect is enormously intensified by Mozart first (in
the "Kyrie") making us guess at the picture by the agitation of mind
into which it throws him, and then suddenly opening the curtain and
letting us view for ourselves the lurid splendours; and surely no more
awful picture of the Judgment was ever painted than we have here in
the "Dies Irae," "Tuba minim," "Rex tremendae," and the "Confutatis."
The method of showing the obverse of the medal first, and then
astonishing us with the sudden magnificence of the other side, is an
old one, and was an old one even in Mozart's time, but he uses it with
supreme mastery, and results that have never been equalled. The most
astonishing part of the "Confutatis" is the prayer at the finish,
where strange cadence upon cadence falls on the ear like a long-drawn
sigh, an