Painting for a Requiem: Mihály Munkácsy's 'The Last Moments of Mozart' (1885)

Abstract

Rather surprisingly, artists were a little slow to take up Georg Nikolaus von Nissen's suggestion in his 1828 biography of Mozart that the dying composer working on his 'Requiem' would make an ideal subject for a painting. Mozart had been dead for over half a century before the first deathbed pictures appeared, but, as if to make up for lost time, such scenes of the stricken composer became almost a genre in their own right during the second half of the 19th century and beyond. Paintings or prints depicting the dying composer connected in some way to his Requiem include examples by Franz Schramm (c.1850), William James Grant (1854), Henry Nelson O'Neill (1862), Hermann Kaulbach (1872), Thomas Shields (1882), Mihály Munkácsy (1885), Francois-Charles Baude (1914) and Charles Chambers (1919). Most of this imagery strikes scholarly sensibilities as barely rising above the kitsch, and with so much value now placed on identifying authentic likenesses of composers, it is hardly surprising that they have received scant attention from musicologists. This article revisits Mozart's last hours as represented in iconography from the second half of the 19th century. Building upon penetrating observations by Cliff Eisen and a valuable study by David Carlson, I will argue that deathbed images of Mozart are illuminating manifestations of deep undercurrents in the composer's reception in the 19th century and well into the 20th. The focus here will be on the grandest of all of these images: a large-scale canvas by the once-renowned Hungarian artist Mihály Munkácsy (1844 – 1900), 'The last moments of Mozart'. In this painting Mozart is shown rehearsing his 'Requiem' despite his impending death, with musicians gathered around a keyboard, his wife Constanze and one of his sons to his right, and a small cluster of figures in the background. Mozart appears as a brooding figure quite dissimilar in mood or even physical appearance to other images of him from the 19th century. Munkácsy's painting is one of the most dramatic transfigurations to have occurred in Mozart's imagery over the last 200 years, and it stands as a testament to deeply rooted beliefs regarding genius and creative destiny. It will also reveal itself to be a compelling example of how history has struggled to give meaning to Mozart's early death.