With this meticulously prepared edition of the Requiem of 1804, Jane Schatkin Hettrick has completed her publication of all of Antonio Salieri's large-scale sacred compositions, which span the years 1767 to 1809 and include four concerted Masses as well as the early Missa stylo a cappella. These volumes, the result of over two decades of scholarly effort, afford a closer view of the changing conditions for the practice of Catholic liturgical music in central Europe around the turn of the nineteenth century, especially in its relationship to opera. Salieri, a dominant figure in the operatic sphere during this period, pursued a different stylistic orientation in his mass settings, favouring the choral over the solo vocal element, perhaps as a more or less conscious response to controversies over the perceived secularization of church music. Yet for the most part he also eschewed the contrapuntal techniques which had long symbolized the genre of musica da chiesa (except in the youthful and accomplished a cappella mass of 1767). This choice possibly reflects the diminishing status of polyphony as a norm even in religious music, and perhaps also that the historicizing tendencies of romantic aesthetics had cast polyphony as an ‘antique’ musical feature.

These traits also characterize the Requiem, which actually stands outside the liturgical context of the Viennese Hofmusikkapelle where Salieri served as director from 1788 to 1824. Hettrick explains this in her comprehensively detailed Introduction, where she describes the work as the most personal of all of Salieri's compositions. Unlike those contemporaries who contributed the period's best-known examples of the genre (including Jommelli, Michael Haydn, Mozart, Eybler and Cherubini), Salieri composed his Requiem for himself, anticipating his own death by more than twenty years and eventually bequeathing the autograph manuscript not to the imperial court but to his close friend and patron, Count Heinrich Wilhelm von Haugwitz. Most notably, he made a telling alteration of the standard liturgical text of the Missa pro defunctis, consistently changing ‘eis’ to ‘ei’ (as in ‘dona ei requiem’) throughout the entire work, in a clear act of self-reference.

Hettrick's edition provides supplementary material in the form of two related motets by Salieri, Spiritus meus attenuabitur and Audite vocem magnam dicentem, as well as the Kyrie and responsorial chants which make up a part of the liturgy of the Libera me (the concluding section of the Requiem, often treated as an independent piece), together with a substitute clarinet part to be used in the event that the English horn of Salieri's original scoring is unavailable. All of these additional items are historically valid in deriving from Viennese sources of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, most of them connected with the composer himself or with events which took place shortly following his death on 7 May 1825: his funeral on 10 May in the Augustinerkirche within the imperial court complex and a memorial service on 22 June in the Minoritenkirche, the principal church of Vienna's Italian community, at which the Requiem was performed for the first time. Yet the volume's resulting aspect of historical compilation stands somewhat at odds with an apparent aim to present a single authoritative text transcending specificities of time, place and occasion, as illustrated by Hettrick's reliance on the concept of Fassung letzter Hand several times in her commentaries. Without the burden of attempting such an idealized textuality, the edition might have chosen as its principal source the score copy and parts prepared for the memorial service, now in the collection of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, rather than the autograph score, so as to transmit an exemplar of a historically appropriate yet non-prescriptive version for the reference of modern performers. And, indeed, one of the manifest virtues of Hettrick's edition is the thoroughness and care with which it documents the diverse contexts of its subject matter, covering a wide range of topics that include Salieri's religious faith, his friendship with Haugwitz and the subsequent history of the Requiem at the latter's estate in Náměšť nad Oslavou, Bohemia, and the performance practice of sacred music in contemporary Vienna.

The Critical Notes to the Requiem observe that ‘in spite of the special meaning of this work to the composer, as expressed in his instructive title [“Little Requiem, composed by me, and for me, Ant. Salieri, lowliest creature”], it appears that Salieri did not prepare the [autograph] manuscript with exceptional care’ (191). The notation in a number of passages is illegible or incorrect to the point of requiring consultation of the Viennese score copy and parts for a proper transcription, and Hettrick adds that Salieri's other manuscripts of liturgical music are neater by comparison. These circumstances probably call for a closer exploration of the Requiem's ‘special meaning’ and of the complex dimensions of individualism and personal significance in musical works altogether c1800, even if the state of biographical and other evidence could never wholly remove the element of speculation. Thus we may ask to what extent the expression ‘lowliest creature’ should be taken at face value, as unambiguous humility and self-abasement, or whether it demonstrates complex rhetorical dimensions, given Salieri's willingness to compose a Requiem for himself and to alter a ‘sacrosanct’ liturgical text, producing a shift away from the age-old Christian emphasis on community.

The historical context and musical style of the work might also provide insights into its composer's possible ambivalence towards mortality. For example, around one half of the longest movement, the Sequence, is occupied by a fivefold, unchanging repetition of a seventeen-bar phrase, beginning at ‘Recordare, Jesu pie’, with intervening passages between each repetition. The phrase consists of four shorter units of four bars each whose endings are all clearly marked by caesuras, with the last unit extended by one bar for greater cadential effect; yet this elongation does little to mediate against the overall feeling of squareness. Even granting the suitability of such an orderly structure to the strophic organization of the text, it is all too easy to find the long series of restatements of identical material perfunctory and even tiresome. Or it could be possible to pursue a more sympathetic interpretation which sets the impersonality and communality of a faith based upon ‘one holy catholic and apostolic Church’ above the allegedly personal significance of this work and the imperatives of individualist originality. The question remains open for the time being.