Mozart: Masonic Funeral Music, K. 477 (479a)

Description

As Mozart specialist Ulrich Konrad was able to prove in 2020, the version of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's "Masonic Funeral Music" that is widely in use today does not stem from the composer himself. Rather, it is a posthumous combination of two different versions of the work, each with different instrumentation.

Mozart wrote this short orchestral piece in 1785 for a Masonic funeral service on the occasion of the death of two members of his lodge. The instrumentation comprised two oboes, a clarinet, a basset horn, two horns and strings. At a later date, Mozart composed two further basset horn parts and a contrabassoon part to replace the horns. The widely known "add-on version", in which all the wind instruments are included, was not intended by Mozart and dates back to the printed publication that contained all the parts in 1805 (i.e. after Mozart's death).

This edition contains all three versions: the original and the later version by Mozart (ed. by Ulrich Konrad) as well as the posthumous double instrumentation (ed. by H. C. Robbins Landon, from the "New Mozart Edition"). The orchestral parts serve all three versions.