Story of the Week: Mozart and the Gray Steward

Thornton Wilder (1897–1975)
From Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays & Writings on Theater

Interesting Links

“Alley Theatre in Texas puts on Thornton Wilder’s last, unfinished play, ‘The Emporium’” (Mark Kennedy for AP, ThorntonWilder.com)

Thornton Wilder’s Playlets (ThorntonWilder.com)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Angel That Troubled the Waters,” Thornton Wilder
• “Porcelain and Pink,” F. Scott Fitzgerald
• “The Garden Lodge,” Willa Cather
• “Rhythm,” Ring Lardner

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Mozart Composes the Requiem, 1854, oil on canvas by English artist William James Grant (1829–1866).

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died at the age of thirty-five on December 5, 1791, and within months rumors began spreading about his life, his music, and especially his death. Perhaps no story, however, captured the public imagination more than the mystery surrounding his unfinished Requiem, the work he was composing during his final weeks. And no part of that story spawned more speculation than the messenger who brought from an anonymous patron the commission and partial payment for the work. In 1828, when the British poet Felicia Hemans published her poem, “Mozart’s Requiem,” she included a note summarizing the version of his death that seemed most prominent among English-speaking audiences:

A short time before the death of Mozart, a stranger of remarkable appearance, and dressed in deep mourning, called at his house and requested him to compose a requiem, in his best style, for the funeral of a person of distinction. The sensitive imagination of the composer (who was at the time out of health) immediately seized upon the idea that this was an omen of his own decease, and that the requiem would be for himself. The nervous excitement under which he laboured to complete the task, produced the effect of realizing this impression, and the music was actually performed at his interment.

Hemans’s poem presumed that the requiem was ultimately written for the composer’s own death and that the exhaustion of creating it killed him. Across the Atlantic two years earlier, Rufus Dawes published a poem, also titled “Mozart’s Requiem,” which included stanzas imagining that the messenger was Death itself:

He was tall, the stranger who gazed on him
     Wrapped high in a sable shroud
His cheek was pale, and his eye was dim,
And the melodist trembled in every limb,
     The while his heart beat loud.

“Mozart, there is one whose errand I bear,
     Who cannot be known to thee;
He grieves for a friend, and would have thee prepare
A requiem, blending a mournful air
     With the sweetest melody.” . . .

Mozart grew pale when the vision fled,
     And his heart beat high with fear;
He knew ’twas a messenger sent from the dead
To warn him, that soon he must make his bed.
     In the dark, chill, sepulchre. . . .

The anonymous messenger, the unexpected death, and the celebrated requiem continued to inspire additional poems, short stories, novels, plays, and even an opera over the course of the next two centuries.* In 1856 an excerpt from Otto Jahn’s masterful biography of Mozart appeared in translation in Dwight’s Journal of Music. It described the messenger as “a stranger” to Mozart, “a tall, lean man, clad in gray, with a serious, solemn face,” and the passage cemented for English and American readers the image of a mysterious “messenger in gray.”

The reality is far more prosaic: The man supposedly clad in gray was Anton Leitgeb, a servant sent in the summer of 1791 by Count Franz Georg von Walsegg-Stuppach to commission a requiem mass in memory of his wife, Anna. Walsegg was notorious for commissioning pieces that he would then claim to have written himself—a ruse that appears to have been the worst-kept secret in Vienna—and part of the deal was that Mozart would keep mum about his involvement. Mozart received a generous and much-needed advance and would collect a final payment upon the work’s completion. Busy with other projects (including the premiere of The Magic Flute), Mozart could not start on the requiem until October; two months later he was dead. Parts of the finished work were indeed played at Mozart’s memorial service, as Hemans noted.

The challenge facing Constanze Mozart after her husband died, leaving her almost penniless, was to get one of Mozart’s former students to finish the work while convincing Walsegg that her husband was responsible for the entire piece and that the authorship was still a secret. When the work was completed and she had been paid for it, she assembled witnesses and proof that her husband wrote it (including a public performance of the entire work before Walsegg’s mass in memory of his wife), and the work was eventually accepted as Mozart’s. The contradictions in her stories both to secure payment of the commission and to retain her rights as her husband’s executor helped fuel the confusion over how one of his most famous works came to be.

A century after Dawes and Hemans published their poems, Thornton Wilder made use of the story for one of his “three-minute plays.” During the previous decade, Wilder had written about forty such playlets, most of them during his years in college. In 1928, the year after the publication of his best-known novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, he was able to use his new status as an international best-selling author to collect and publish sixteen of them, including four that had been written specifically for the book. One of the new pieces, “Mozart and the Gray Steward,” was the longest in the collection—a six-minute play, one might say.

Most readers in the 1920s would have been familiar with the history behind Mozart’s Requiem, yet Wilder succeeds at making the story his own. Skillfully blending both fact and legend, the playlet promotes the aesthetic ideal that underlies much of Wilder’s writing: a work, be it music, painting, or writing, becomes art not when it concerns an individual but rather (as the Gray Steward says) when it gives “a voice to all those millions . . . who have no one but you to speak for them.” In a 1940 journal entry, Wilder elaborated:

The emotion of a Mr. C. D. Forrester of Portland, Oregon, over the death of his daughter, his dog, or the soldiers of Finland does not concern the citizens of the United States, however sincere they are. If he were a great artist the expression of his emotion might concern us all, but not by reason of the object mourned, but by reason of the emotion itself in its expression. Neither the mourner nor the mourned is the subject of the work of art. So beyond counting are, and have been, and will be, the subjects of pity that to emphasize one example—either as object or as agent—is to offend the law of proportion and to intrude an egotism. By art the emotion is raised to the plane of generalization and all mourners and all sufferers are included.

This is the meaning of my definition: a poet is one who realizes the separate existence of a million souls. . . .

Or, as Wilder famously told a reporter in 1961, “I am not interested in the ephemeral—such subjects as the adulteries of dentists. I am interested in those things that repeat and repeat and repeat in the lives of the millions.” He believed that the theater offered a unique opportunity to transform specific people and events into art. As he wrote in a preface to one of his books, “It is through the theatre’s power to raise the exhibited individual action into the realm of idea and type and universal that it is able to evoke our belief.”

* The works inspired by Mozart’s Requiem include, of course, Amadeus, the 1984 film directed by by Miloš Forman, which imagines that the mysterious messenger was Mozart’s archrival, Antonio Salieri. The film’s fictional plot caps a long tradition; it was adapted from an 1897 opera by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, which was inspired in turn by an 1831 play by Alexander Pushkin.

For more information about Thornton Wilder’s three-minute plays, see the introduction for “The Angel That Troubled the Waters,” a previous Story of the Week selection.

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Note: The Italian composer Antonio Salieri was appointed the director of the Italian opera by the Habsburg court, a post he held from 1774 until 1792. Some of Mozart’s letters earlier in his career complain of Salieri’s treatment; the perceived rivalry between the two composers was greatly exaggerated after Mozart’s death and eventually led to rumors that Salieri had poisoned him.

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Mozart is seated at a table in a mean room in Vienna orchestrating the “Magic Flute.” Leaves of ruled paper are strewn about the floor. His wife enters in great excitement. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Sunday, April 13, 2025

Mozart and the Gray Steward