Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Requiem

I don't know a thing about classical music. I've listened to a lot, but I've always maintained the gaze of an admiring ignorant.
This introduction is necessary because I want to tackle something unattainable, but I don't have the tools to do so.
Obvious objection: then why don't you keep quiet?
Especially since the piece has already been reviewed twice: is it really necessary to insist?
The answer is equally simple: because Mozart's "Requiem" is a cornerstone of my world, and what I think has not yet been said.
So, I am almost compelled to look at it, like one looks at the monolith in "2001: A Space Odyssey".
To come to terms with it. My wrists are trembling, can you believe it?

Mozart's Requiem Mass K626 in D minor is dated 1791: the year of his death.
Someone will finish it (particularly Xavier Sussmayer), but the original draft reaches only the seventh passage: the "Confutatis".
An integral part of the opera's charm is not a negligible detail: it is a requiem mass written by someone who died before finishing it. Legends abound, Mozart was impoverished and ill, and he received the task of composing a "Requiem" from an unknown benefactor. Milos Forman in "Amadeus" has given his romanticized version of this story, but in the official history, the mysterious commissioner remains shrouded in shadow. The final result is only one: Mozart ended up writing a Requiem for himself.
I want to review this work of art on Debaser for one specific reason: for me, the "Requiem" is the first dark album in history.
From "Dies irae" to "Rex tremendae" to the incredible finale painted by "Confutatis", I feel that this work is the Tetragrammaton of the darkest music. The "Confutatis" creates the first true gothic chorus in history: "Confutatis maledictis, flammis acribus addictis".

Below, the orchestra draws something macabre and singable that today, perhaps, we would call a "riff".
An instrumental phrase, repeated and perfect.
Dark stuff that not even Christian Death... no one will ever do better.
Without the "Requiem", "Marble Index" and "Desertshore" by Nico wouldn't have been conceived, without the "Requiem" we wouldn't have had Ian Curtis, Michael Gira, Douglas Pierce, David Tibet. "Faith" by the Cure would not have been conceivable.
I'm not saying these authors have listened to Mozart, it's not certain. But there are archetypes, the world of ideas, and the myth of the cave. All these authors recount, without intending to and in their own way, Mozart's terrible race toward the end, his plunging into a common grave, his death in misery. The catastrophe of an unappreciated sensitivity.
The "Requiem" is fear and fog, a sense of impending doom, a precipice. A year later, Europe would know the absolute trauma of the French Revolution, the bloodbath of the Terror, the guillotine as the new perfect and terrible divinity. Nothing would ever be the same. By the way, Madame Du Barry, my pseudonym, would be condemned to the guillotine on December 8, 1793, two years and three days after Mozart's death.
There is only one album, in the following decades, that manages to contain the same dramatic force and the same sense of epitaph: "Closer" by Joy Division, released after the death of Ian Curtis.
I like to imagine them, Wolfgang and Ian, somehow together in the most absurd of jam-sessions.

Drunk and happy, finally.