Program Notes

New World Symphony presents
Mozart’s Requiem

Saturday, November 14, 2026 at 8:00 PM
Adrienne Arsht Center, Knight Concert Hall Weiser Auditorium

Stephanie Childress, conductor
SINGERS
Master Chorale of South Florida
Brett Karlin, chorus master

RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS
Toward the Unknown Region (1906)
Approximate duration: 15 minutes

Somehow the land that had produced such influential composers as Thomas Tallis, John Dowland and Henry Purcell went fallow for 200 years, and it fell to foreigners to keep the music flowing from the British Isles. It wasn’t until around the turn of the 20th century that a cohort emerged capable of rekindling the flame of homegrown music, with Ralph Vaughan Williams at the center of it.

Even though he sought out Bruch in Germany and Ravel in France to study their crafts thoroughly, Vaughan Williams understood that a thriving English music had to do more than just mimic continental styles. He attuned his ears to the sounds around him, soaking up folksongs, popular music and all flavors of collective singing that popped up anywhere from a soccer stadium to a factory floor.

Vaughan Williams channeled his developing ideas into choir music that helped establish him as a major composer, starting with Toward the Unknown Region, which he drafted in 1905. When he conducted its premiere at a festival two years later, the critic for The Times hailed its “nobility and earnestness of invention which mark the composer as the foremost of the younger generation.”

Toward the Unknown Region was a setting of a portion of Leaves of Grass by the American poet Walt Whitman, whose marriage of mystical idealism and down-to-earth humanity proved to be a crucial touchstone for Vaughan Williams. Around the same time he drafted this 15-minute “song for chorus and orchestra,” he was plotting a much larger setting of Whitman’s poetry that grew into his first great masterpiece, A Sea Symphony from 1909.

The text is one section of a larger poem titled “Whispers of Heavenly Death,” and mortality is the unspoken theme of this poem that dares to face that “Unknown Region” head on. The music matches the text’s passage from hesitant steps forward to ecstatic release, erupting into a swirling climax at the lines, “Then we burst forth, we float, / In time and space.”

Toward the Unknown Region

Darest thou now O soul,
Walk out with me toward the unknown region,
Where neither ground is for the feet nor any path to follow?

No map there, nor guide, Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hand, Nor face with blooming flesh, nor lips, nor eyes, are in that land

I know it not O soul, Nor dost thou, all is a blank before us, All waits undreamed of in that region, that inaccessible land.

Till when the ties loosen, All but the ties eternal, time and space, Nor darkness, gravitation, sense, nor any bounds bounding us.

Then we burst forth, we float, In time and space O soul, prepared for them, Equal, equipt at last, (O joy! O fruit of all!) them to fulfil O soul.

— Walt Whitman

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Requiem in D minor, K. 626 (1791)
Completed by Franz Xaver Süssmayr
Approximate duration: 55 minutes

Mozart, deep in debt and struggling to support his family in the suburbs of Vienna, was in no position to be choosy when he was approached with a strange commission in the summer of 1791. The patron was a 28-year-old nobleman and amateur composer named Franz von WalseggStuppach, who wanted a Requiem Mass that he could present in his family’s 50-room castle to honor the recent death of his wife. The catch was that the count wanted Mozart to remain anonymous—so that he could pass off the work as his own. Mozart accepted the terms and a 50percent down payment, and he turned his focus to the Requiem as soon as he could, once he got past pressing deadlines for two operas, Die Zauberflote and La clemenza di Tito.

As of the December night when the gravely ill Mozart gathered friends around his bedside to sing through portions of the Requiem, he had completed and orchestrated the first portion, Requiem aeternam, and he had drafted the vocal parts and skeletal harmonies for the next six sections. He died just hours later, possibly from rheumatic fever (related to strep throat), leaving the remainder of the Requiem unfinished.

Mozart’s widow, Constanze, could hardly afford to forfeit the unpaid balance on the Requiem, and she wasted little time enlisting help from her late husband’s students. Franz Xaver Sussmayr ended up orchestrating the unfinished movements, and he completed the rest of the Requiem from scratch, possibly consulting various scraps left by Mozart, if we are to believe Constanze. (There’s no way to know if she was telling the truth or just trying to bolster the score’s market value by attributing more of it to her husband.)

Constanze also told a biographer that her late husband “expressed a wish to try his hand at this type of composition, the more so as the higher forms of church music had always appealed to his genius.” Mozart grew up in the cathedral town of Salzburg, where his father was a musician in the court of the Prince-Archbishop—an all-powerful figure who ruled over both religious and secular life. The most miserable years of Mozart’s life were those he spent as a teenager and young adult working alongside his father in service to a particularly obnoxious Prince-Archbishop, but at least he got good practice writing masses for Sunday services. He was also exposed to some of the finest church music of the age, including a Requiem for vocal soloists, choir and orchestra composed by his Salzburg colleague Michael Haydn (brother of the great Joseph Haydn), which left a lasting influence.

After Mozart struck out on his own as a freelancer in Vienna, the only religious music he wrote was a mass that served as a peace offering when he brought his new bride home to Salzburg to meet his disapproving father. Meanwhile a new friend and patron in Vienna who was old enough to remember the forgotten glories of the first half of the century introduced Mozart to the polyphony of Bach and Handel, and that old style of counterpoint became a crucial ingredient in Mozart’s mature sound.

The introductory Requiem aeternam marries the tunefulness and emotional immediacy that Mozart honed as an opera composer with the careful layering of independent lines he gleaned from Baroque polyphony. Those antique techniques are on full display in the Kyrie, constructed as a formal double fugue that stretches the syllables of those pleading phrases (“Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy”) into elaborate displays of vocal precision and endurance.

The Dies irae (“Day of Wrath”) whips up a kinetic frenzy with quivering tremolo bowing and pounding strikes on the timpani. In the Tuba mirum (Latin for “wondrous trumpet”), a solo trombone provides an obligato counter-line to the solo bass, representing the call to the last judgment. Borrowing a page from opera, Mozart uses all four vocal soloists in turn to bring out contrasting elements of the text. Rex tremendae majestatis is another chorus that channels the bygone Baroque sound with its stern dotted rhythms (i.e. alternating long and short notes), a texture associated with solemn ceremony. The prayers of the four soloists intertwine in Recordare, Jesu pie, a call to Jesus asking to be remembered and absolved.

To emphasize the contrasting fates that await those who are judged, the Confutatis splits the choir between the agitated men who sing, “When the accursed have been confounded, and given over to the bitter flames,” followed by the angelic woman singing, “call me with the blessed.” This portion of the funeral mass known as the Sequence ends with the Lacrimosa dies illa, which Mozart placed in a consoling triplet meter marked by anguished sighs from the violins and choral harmonies that echo the initial prayer for mercy in the Kyrie. His sketch breaks off after eight measures, providing direction for Sussmayr’s completion.

For the two portions of the Offertorium section that comes next—the liberating Domine Jesu and the humble Hostias—Mozart got as far as sketching vocal parts and bass lines. That left Sussmayr with the task of writing all-new material in a matching style (and even mimicking his teacher’s handwriting style) for the Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei sections, relying on his immersive knowledge of Mozart’s style that came from working as his copyist, along with his own creative instincts as a budding opera composer. For the Lux aeterna that concludes the mass, Sussmayr adapted those words to fit the music of Mozart’s first two sections. As tragic as it is that Mozart did not get to finish this glorious swan song, the final form of the music serves as a unique memorial, with even its imperfections and missed opportunities reminding us to thank our lucky stars that a genius with unfettered access to divine inspiration once walked among us mere mortals.

– © 2026 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer and writer based in Seattle. In addition to providing program notes for the New World Symphony, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and others, he is also the artistic director of Many Messiahs, a project that reframes George Frideric Handel’s masterpiece as a collective call for justice.

Mozart Requiem Texts and Translations

Introitus

Requiem aeternam dona ets, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ets. Te decet hymnus, Deus, in Sion, et tibi reddetur votum in Jerusalem. Exudi orationem meam, ad te omnis caro veniet. Requiem aeternam dona ets, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ets.

---

Grant them eternal rest, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine on them. Thou, O God, art praised in Sion, and unto Thee shall the vow be performed in Jerusalem. Hear my prayer, unto Thee shall all flesh come. Grant them eternal rest, 0 Lord, and may perpetual light shine on them.

Kyrie

Kyrie eleison.
Christe eleison.
Kyrie eleison.

---

Lord have mercy upon us.
Christ have mercy upon us.
Lord have mercy upon us.

Sequentia

Dies irae, dies illa
Solvet saeclum in favilla,
Teste David cum Sibylla.

Quantus tremor est futurus
Quando judex est venturus
Cuncta stricte discussurus.

Tuba mirum spargens sonum
Per sepulcra regionum
Coget omnes ante thronum.

Mors slopebit et natora
Cum resurget creatura
Judicanti responsura.

Liber scriptus proferetur
In quo totum continetur,
Unde mundus judicetur.

Judex ergo cum sedebit
Quidquid latet apparebit,
Nil inultum remanebit.

Quid sum miser tunc dicturus,
Quem patronum togaturus,
Cum vix justus sit securus?

Rex tremendae majestatis,
Qui salvandos salvas gratis,
Salve me, fons pietatis.

Recordare, Jesu pie,
Quod sum causa tuae viae,
Ne me perdas ilia die.

Quaerens me sedisti lassus,
Redemisti crucem passus,
Tamus labor non sit cassus.

Juste judex ultionis
Donum fac remissionis
Ante diem rationis.

lngemisco tamquam reus,
Culpa rubet vultus meus,
Supplicanti parce, Deus.

Qui Mariam absolvisti
Et latronem exaudisti,
Mihi quoque spem dedisti.

Preces meae non sum dignae,
Sed tu bonus fac benigne,
Ne perenni cremet igne.

Inter oves locurn praesta,
Et ab haedis me sequestra,
Statuens in parle dextra.

Confutatis maledictis
Flammis acribus addictis,
Voca me cum benedictis.

Oro supplex et acclinis,
Cor contritum quasi cinis,
Gere curam mei finis.

Lacrimosa dies ilia
Qua resurget ex favilla
Judicandus homo reus.
Huic ergo parce, Deus,
Pie Jesu Domine,
Dona els requiem.

---

Day of wrath, that day
Will dissolve the earth in ashes
As David and the Sibyl bear witness.

What dread there will be
When the Judge shall come
To judge all things strictly.

A trumpet, spreading a wondrous sound
Through the graves of all lands,
Will drive mankind before the throne.

Death and Nature shall be astonished
When all creation rises again
To answer to the Judge.

A book, written in, will be brought forth
In which is contained everything that is,
Out of which the world shall be judged.

When therefore the Judge takes His seat
Whatever is hidden will reveal itself.
Nothing will remain unavenged.

What then shall 1 say, wretch that I am,
What advocate entreat to speak for me,
When even the righteous may hardly be secure?

King of awful majesty,
Who freely savest the redeemed,
Save me, O fount of goodness.

Remember, blessed Jesu,
That I am the cause of Thy pilgrimage,
Do not forsake me on that day.

Seeking me Thou didst sit down weary,
Thou didst redeem me, suffering death on the cross.
Let not such toil be in vain.

Just and avenging Judge,
Grant remission
Before the day of reckoning.

I groan like a guilty man.
Guilt reddens my face.
Spare a suppliant, O God.

Thou who didst absolve Mary Magdalene
And didst hearken to the thief,
To me also hast Thou given hope.

My prayers are not worthy,
But Thou in Thy merciful goodness grant
That I burn not in everlasting fire.

Place me among Thy sheep
And separate me from the goats,
Setting me on Thy right hand.

When the accursed have been confounded
And given over to the bitter flames,
Call me with the blessed.

I pray in supplication on my knees.
My heart contrite as the dust,
Safeguard my fate.

Mournful that day
When from the dust shall rise
Guilty man to be judged.
Therefore spare him, O God.
Merciful Jesu,
Lord Grant them rest.

Offertorium

Domine, Jesu Christe, Rex gloriae,
libera animas omniurn fidelium defunctorum
de poenis inferni, et de prof undo lacu:
libera cas de ore leonis,
ne absorbeat eas tartarus, ne cadant in obscurum,

sed signifer sanctus Michael
repraesentet eas in lucem sanctam,
quam olim Abrahae promisisti
et semini ejus.

Hostias et preces, tibi, Domine,
laudis offerimus:
tu suscipe pro animabus illis,
quarum hodie memoriam facimus:
fac eas, Domine, de morte Iransire ad vitam,
quam olim Abrahae promisisti
et semini ejus.

---

Lord Jesus Christ, King of glory,
deliver the souls of all the faithful

departed from the pains of hell and from the bottomless pit.
Deliver them from the lion's mouth.
Neither let them fall into darkness
nor the black abyss swallow them up.

And let St. Michael, Thy standard-bearer,
lead them into the holy light
which once Thou didst promise
to Abraham and his seed.

We offer unto Thee this sacrifice
of prayer and praise.
Receive it for those souls
whom today we commemorate.
Allow them, O Lord, to cross
from death into the life
which once Thou didst promise to Abraham
and his seed.

Sanctus

Sanctus. Sanctus, Sanctus,
Dominus Deus Sabaoth!
Pleni suni coeli et terra gloria tua.
Osanna in excelsis.

---

Holy, holy, holy,
Lord God of Sabaoth.
Heaven and earth are full of Thy glory.
Hosanna in the highest.

Benedictus

Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini.
Osanna in excelsis.

---

Blessed is He who cometh in the name of the Lord.
Hosanna in the highest.

Agnus Dei

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,
dona eis requiem.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,
dona eis requiem sempiternam.

---

Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world,
grant them rest.
Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world,
grant them everlasting rest.

Communio

Lux aeterna luceat eis, Domine,
cum sanctis mis in aeternum,
quia pius es.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine,
et lux perpetua luceat eis,
cum sanetis tuis in aeternum,
quia plus es.

---

May eternal light shine on them, O Lord.
with Thy saints for ever, because
Thou art merciful.
Grant the dead eternal rest, O Lord,
and may perpetual light shine on them,
with Thy saints for ever,
because Thou are merciful.