Mozart’s Assassins Are Dead, But Mozart, Like Mankind, Is Immortal

by Dennis Speed

Mozart’s Requiem is the needed antidote to the inhuman politics of the moment. Mozart, the political enemy of the dying oligarchies of Europe, and an admirer of the American Revolution, immortalized himself against the killers that poisoned him. It is said that Beethoven once referred to the Requiem as “not a mass for the dead, but for the living.” The New York City Schiller Institute Community Chorus has based its advocacy of the Requiem, performed at the Verdi tuning, on precisely this hypothesis.

Although the 28 pages of the 2002 Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 were finally released this past July, the people of New York City and the United States are still traumatized. The Obama Administration’s commitment to war and killing prevents any meaningful solidarity or reconciliation among citizens. “When madness rules the state, murder walks the land.”

In contrast, the modest but successful assembly of numbers of citizens, non-professional singers primarily, through the Schiller Institute New York City Community Chorus, to master the principles of Mozart’s Requiem, including both its study and performance, directly addresses and transcends the deepest emotions and fears that are otherwise prone to erupt in irrational violence, often not even understood by its perpetrators.

By study of Classical principles in this way, the citizen can once again find his voice, not merely as an individual, but as a constituency. Without developing this capability to educate the emotions, the citizen is incapable of self-government, no matter how strongly he or she may feel about issues.

The Manhattan Project of Lyndon LaRouche has emphasized that the return to mass-based choral singing, starting in New York City and eventually spreading nationally, is probably the only efficient way to return the voice of the American people to its citizens. Classical composers Brahms and Dvorak, as well as others earlier, including Beethoven, knew this. They sought to advance the liberating power of Classical music in the lives of recently freed citizens in Europe and the United States through the advanced techniques of Classical composition.

The Requiem of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, written in 1791, was a great moment in human discovery. During that year, prior to commencing work on the Requiem, Mozart had already written the operas La Clemenza di Tito and The Magic Flute, the String Quintet in E Flat, the Clarinet Concerto in A, two pieces for Ben Franklin’s glass harmonica, and many songs. He had stated to his wife no later than October of that same year that he believed he was being poisoned.

For Mozart, however, death was swallowed up in victory. His student Sussmayer, to whom he had given meticulous instructions, as well as sketches as to how to complete the Requiem, did so. “If Mozart did not write the music, then the man who wrote it was a Mozart,” Beethoven is reported to have said. The Requiem was performed at the funerals of Beethoven, Haydn and Chopin.

For the American people, and New York City in particular, however, the Requiem can today perform a special service. More than 1500 persons are being recruited to the several choruses that the Schiller Institute New York City Community Chorus has pledged itself to found and develop as a living memorial to the immortality of Mozart, as well as to those murdered on September 11, 2001, and those murdered afterwards all over the world – in drone strikes, irregular warfare, sanctions, and retaliation against people and nations that had little or nothing to do with that horrible crime.

LaRouche’s Manhattan Project, which encompasses the choral principle as well as the development of the New Presidency, centers around the true significance of the real Alexander Hamilton–not the Broadway musical Hamilton, but the Washington-Hamilton Presidency. Hamilton’s four great Treasury reports did not define a set of economic measures as such. They proclaimed that the productivity of the nation must be based, not on slavery, usury, or free trade, but on the discoveries and inventions of the individual creative mind as the source of wealth, as the driver, the characteristic of all truly human physical production. A policy equivalent to Mozart’s.

Total rejection of the Broadway musical’s virtual-reality in favor of the classical Hamiltonian placement of the American political voice is necessary to achieve that which is uniquely available through the principle of Mozart’s Requiem, i.e. the creation of a new American chorus upon which our republic depends.

As with Hamilton, Mozart’s triumph over his own mortality sounds the certain trumpet of humanity’s true mission. Mozart’s assassins are dead, but Mozart, like mankind, is immortal.