'Mozart devoured all he could of the music of Handel and Bach and earlier composers towards the end of his life … [He] knew Handel’s Messiah inside out, having made a new orchestration of the oratorio, and if you listen to the dotted rhythms in the strings of the Requiem’s first movement, the Introitus, and the first fugue theme of the Kyrie, and compare them to consecutive movements from the Messiah [Surely, He Hath Borne Our Griefs, then And With His Stripes], the similarity would have today’s copyright lawyers rubbing their hands in glee.'
Tom Service makes a critical point about aesthetic influence and borrowing in his recent Guardian piece on Mozart’s Requiem.
So allow me to play devil’s – not to mention artists’ – advocate for a radical deconstruction of ‘today’s copyright’: Would we have benefited as a society from lawers getting involved in Mozart’s reuse of Handel’s original content?
