On this All Souls’ Day, here are two Requiems, which commemorate the dead with beauty and transcendence, and may accompany our prayers this day.
The first is Mozart’s famous rendition, which he left incomplete on his death on December 5th, 1791, and completed by his disciple, Franz Xaver Süssmayr, in 1792, who did such a marvelous, even miraculous, job that it’s hard to tell where Mozart ends and Süssmayr begins.
The second is by Gabriel Fauré, composed a century after Mozart’s, between 1887 and 1890 (revised in 1900), which has a different, some say more optimistic, sense. But the two Requiems are complementary, and hopefully lead us to share in some way with those faithful departed who have gone before us.