Mozart's Requiem is a choral masterpiece whose genesis is shrouded in mystery – one that makes the piece all the more fascinating and emotionally stirring.

Mozart set this liturgical text to music for a patron who had lost his young wife to illness earlier that year. But after his death, his widow, Constanze claimed that throughout Mozart’s last painful days, he believed he was writing the Requiem for his own funeral. And he was!

Even though it had to be completed by his contemporaries, the circumstances of the composition, combined with Mozart’s genius, make it no ordinary piece of music. It has the drama and humanity of his stage masterpieces. His operas wrestle with the beauty and complexity of life in the same way his Requiem grapples with the mystery of death.

Composed by a man on the edge of consciousness, Mozart willed his last creation into life with his final breaths.