Happy Ending for Unfinished Mozart

Article by Allan Kozinn, The New York Times

Mozart left comparatively few major (or potentially major) works unfinished, and while it may seem daunting–presumptious even–for another musician to complete these scores, the lure of making an incomplete work whole is clearly too great to resist.

Robert D. Levin, a superb pianist and a skilled, conscientious musicologist, has completed or reconstructed several works by Mozart and other composers. His version of the Mozart Requiem is the most satisfying of the many completions of that score.

His latest reconstruction is a completion of Mozart's Mass in C minor, K. 427, commissioned by Carnegie Hall.

Mozart began work on the Mass in 1782, referred to it in a letter to his father in January 1783, and apparently performed part of it in Salzburg that October. Why he left it incomplete is a mystery.

Perhaps he just didn't feel like finishing it, or had other obligations that required him to put it off. But the music he did complete–the Kyrie, Gloria, part of the Credo, and much of the Sanctus–is so ambitious and so magnificent that it is difficult to imagine Mozart losing interest in it.

To complete the score, Mr. Levin examined the surviving sources, including a partial manuscript; a full score assembled after Mozart's death by a choirmaster in Augsburg, based on the performance materials from Salzburg; and a handful of brief sketches for several of the missing movements.

The result was a glorious, fully Mozartean vision of a complete Mass, most of it Mozart's in one way or another, and the rest of it as inspired a guess as we're likely to hear.