Wolfgang Mozart, famously, had the temerity to die before completing his Requiem, a commissioned piece for which he was pre-paid 400 florins by his patron, Count Von Walsegg.

Constanza Mozart did not allow mourning blind her to business opportunity. She encouraged a student of her late husband to complete the Requiem, so that she might take a go at selling it twice.

Thus, the Widow Mozart received a further 600 of Walsegg’s florins for the Unfinished Requiem’s finished delivery. The Count’s accountants might well have felt aggrieved. But in the end, the 1000 florin investment worked out rather well. Mozart’s Requiem [with additions by Süssmayr, his student] would become one of the most beloved scores in all of classical music. It would even earn the bold Patron a walk-on part in Amadeus, some two hundred years later.

Alas, death precluded the opportunity.

***

But Mozart has other unfinished business; unfinished music, for which I have fallen.

In 1779, the 23-year-old Salzburger was bristling to kick-start his career in Vienna, and sought operatic opportunities that would allow him shine. The capital was obsessed by all-things-Turkish at the time, mostly because of the news headlines. Turkish ships were continually kidnapping Christians for enslavement in the Ottoman Empire – and the captives’ horrendous fate, from a handsome distance, seemed to have some allure. Glamorous misery has always been fashionable.

If a composer wished to impress the Emperor in Vienna, a piece of German musical theatre featuring Turkish bondage and harems was sure to impress.

In a speculative manner (that is, with no payment, or promise of payment), young Mozart embarked on telling the story of Zaide, the Sultan’s favourite joy-lady, who would defy her master by falling in love with a fellow-slave. Herr Mozart was two-thirds the way through his new opera when a missive from Germany altered his plans. He had received a real commission, for real money.

Thus, his speculative enslavement-chic work, which we now call Zaide, was promptly jettisoned.

Not that Wolfgang considered it in any way inferior. Indeed, he attempted several times to resuscitate the unfinished Zaide, but the cultural moment had lapsed. The mercurial Viennese had moved on, favouring a more comedic tone to their musical storytelling.  Zaide no longer fit the bill. It was silenced.

Mozart stuffed the score somewhere in the back room.

It did not resurface until after his death in 1791.

Constanza couldn’t make head nor tail of the incomplete manuscript. She did, however, smell a florid florin in those pretty arias. In time, she sold the unfinished opera to a musician who, eventually, got it published in 1866.

***

Have you ever fallen for a melody?

All the majesty of Mozart lies in a completed aria, in the completed first Act of this incomplete story. In repudiation of the Sultan, our heroine falls for a fellow-slave. Gomatz is full of exile-angst, from which slumber is his only reprieve. In a most tender moment, Zaide finds him at rest, and wishes him gentle sleep. She places her portrait in his limp hands, that he might know he is not alone, when he reawakens to captivity.

‘Ruhe Sanft’ [Sleep Peacefully] is an air of arresting beauty. The orchestration is inventive, playing between Zaide’s voice and oboe, the latter representing the spirit of Shackled Man. Her melody, with upward leaps of ambition, seems to double down on her lover’s dream of freedom.

It is an axiom of music that its divinity cannot be described. Music’s mode is otherly. It is the expression of desires unspoken; of feelings yet unfelt.

“Sleep peacefully, my beloved. Sleep until happiness dawns,

My portrait I give you. See, how kindly it smiles upon you.

Sweet dreams rock thee to sleep. And grant your wish at last,

That the things of which you dream may ripen into reality.”

Unfortunately, the story and spoken words of the opera became forever lost in the back room, and could never have been sold-on by Constanza. Putative Süssmayrs have taken a go at distilling the work, but lightning resists the bottle.

Though Mozart’s fine arias craft an emotional arc, it has never fully been clear how the plot of Zaide resolves. Pragmatic Wolfie, after all, neglected to compose that last Act. Circumstances meant he had moved on, leaving fragments of Zaide caught, for all time, on a line of beauty.