Kyrie eleison: lyrics and translation
- Kyrie eleison.Lord, have mercy.The first melody, on the word "Kyrie": the voice drops sharply in one wide leap and pulls straight back up. The basses begin it.
- Christe eleison.Christ, have mercy.The second melody, on the word "Christe": many short notes in a row, fast and winding. From here both melodies sound at the same time, in different voices.
- Kyrie eleison.Lord, have mercy.At the end the music suddenly freezes, and the choir pronounces the last "eleison" syllable by syllable. The final chord has no middle note, the one that usually makes music sound bright or sad: the ending is left open.
Press Play or the space bar: the singers and players sounding at that moment light up on stage, and the words appear here. Meanwhile, tap any group to find out who they are.
Manuscript: the end of the Introitus and the start of the Kyrie
Leaf 5 verso of the same score. On the left, the last chords of the Introitus; to the right of the double bar, the Kyrie has already begun. Mozart wrote the voices and the bass; the orchestral doubling was probably added by his pupils, which shows in the lighter ink.
Tap an area on the page or an item in the list.
About
Two melodies sound at once: one with sharp leaps, the other fast and winding. The words here are Greek, not Latin - the oldest words in the whole service, left over from the time when churches spoke Greek.
The basses start the first melody, and almost at once a second, faster one is laid over it. From then on both pass from voice to voice without a break: the moment one ends, another voice has already picked it up, and there is nowhere to stop. At the end everything suddenly freezes, the choir pronounces "eleison" syllable by syllable, and the movement closes on a chord that gives no sense of an ending.
Worth knowing
The Kyrie is written as a fugue: the voices sing the same melody in turn, each chasing the last, and none of them is ever silent. The melody itself almost repeats the subject of Handel's fugue "And with his stripes" from Messiah. Taking someone else's theme was not seen as theft but as a mark of respect, and an educated listener was meant to recognise it. The second melody, the quick "Christe", also comes from Handel - from his Dettingen Anthem of 1743.
These same melodies return at the end of the work, in the last movement, Lux aeterna, only with different words: the Requiem closes in a circle.
Mozart wrote down only the choir and the bass line in the Kyrie. The instruments were added by two copyists straight after his death, so that the Kyrie could be performed at the memorial service on 10 December: the strings and woodwinds simply double the choir, and the second copyist added the trumpets and timpani. Who they were is unknown. For a long time they were thought to be Mozart's pupil Franz Jacob Freystädtler and Süssmayr, but the Viennese archival researcher Michael Lorenz compared the handwriting and ruled out both.
The first to suspect that someone other than Mozart wrote here was the German editor Franz Beyer, in 1971. In the basset horn parts - veiled wind instruments related to the clarinet - he found twenty-one mistakes in the accidentals. Mozart, who knew the instrument well, would never have made them.
Mozart studied the fugues of Bach and Handel in the 1780s in Baron van Swieten's library, where old music was played every Sunday. The Kyrie is written in that tradition.
On the word "Kyrie" the melody falls in one wide leap, slightly less than an octave. Such a leap is hard to sing in tune: the ear gives the singer no help in finding the note, so it has to be worked out. Mozart chooses it deliberately - the plea for mercy begins with something breaking.
Conversation
What you heard
Share your impressions of what you heard, your feelings, or simply your thoughts out loud.
Only for the name under your comment. Your email is shown to no one.
Quiet here so far. Yours would be the first.