Item: 1 CD - Mozart's Requiem, performed by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Mozart's 250th birthday is being celebrated in Salzburg this week. I think the language is a little odd -- celebrating anybody's "250th birthday" seems not quite possible. A festival is in order, certainly, but calling it something like "the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth" might sound a little more dignified. Maybe they thought that took too long to say.

Anyway, the detail that stood out from all that I read about him today is that when Mozart died in 1791, he was the same age as I am now.

He wrote the Requiem while he was dying. A man named Süssmayr is commonly supposed to have completed it. The music is about death, condemnation, hope, rest, benediction.

I sang in the soprano section in a performance of the Requiem at National Presbyterian Church in 1999. Practicing this piece of music for weeks leading up to Easter gave me an appreciation for it that I could not possibly have had just from hearing it. All those notes, all those Latin words humming in my head. It wasn't a composition that was easy to live with in that way.

For me the inspired moments are Dies Irae, for the way it sounds like flames licking higher and higher, and Sanctus, which is a slow outpouring of praise that sounds like it's being sung by the entire earth. But there are multiple other gorgeous sequences, from wretched to sublime. I know very little about assessing music, so descriptions fail other than "it's insane" or "there's nothing like it," which are both true, but inadequate.