Since there’s a couple of lectures coming up, I’m brushing up on my Mozart. And I came across a little detail surrounding the Requiem I wasn’t aware of before and that just begs to be shared.
So, you all know that Mozart never finished his Requiem, a work “secretly” commissioned by Count Walsegg-Stuppach who wanted to pass it off as his own composition (something he was known to do, so he never fooled anyone but himself…). After Mozart’s death, his widow Constanze, in dire need of money, sought to fulfill the contract and had the Requiem completed from sketches, word of mouth and conjecture by Franz Xaver Süßmayer, one of Mozart’s pupils/assistants. To fool the Count into believing that Mozart had completed the Requiem himself, he copied out the finished parts, added his parts, all while attempting to mimick Mozart’s handwriting. He even faked his signature on the cover with “di me W:A: Mozart”, and here comes the juicy tidbit I want to share with you: he committed the blunder of blunders by continuing with “mpr/792“. Completly forgetting the small, but not unimportant detail that Mozart had died the previous year, in 1791…
Even so, the Count either didn’t spot it, or he didn’t care.

And some more unconnected Requiem-trivia:
Constanze sold the Requiem five times: to the Count, to King Friedrich Wilhelm II. of Prussia, one for an “official” first performance, and two to publishers. Quite the businesswoman, and not the flighty airhead some earlier biographies would have us believe!
To round things off, a “Curse of the Requiem” story: the Viennese composer Joseph Leopold Eybler, who was asked first by Konstanze to complete the Requiem, but who gave up after some attempts, suffered a (non-fatal)  stroke while conducting the Requiem in 1833…