Mozart – Requiem in D minor, K. 626: III. Tuba mirum

"Tuba mirum spargens sonum per sepulchra regionum, coget omnes ante thronum." The trumpet, scattering its wondrous sound through the graves of every land, will summon all before the throne. A solo trombone calls first, entirely alone. Then the bass answers it — and the two circle each other for a full minute before anyone else is allowed in. The tenor follows, then the alto, then the soprano, each entering higher than the last, as though the summons were passing upward through the dead. By the final bars all four are singing together. The instrument Mozart writes for is a trombone, not a trumpet, despite the text. In the church music of his time the trombone was the voice associated with the dead and with judgement, and its solo here is one of the longest and most exposed he ever wrote for the instrument. The vocal parts and the bass line are Mozart's. The orchestration around them was completed after his death by Franz Xaver Süssmayr. PERFORMERS Wilma Lipp, soprano Hilde Rössel-Majdan, contralto Anton Dermota, tenor Walter Berry, bass Wiener Singverein — chorus master: Reinhold Schmid Berliner Philharmoniker Herbert von Karajan, conductor ABOUT THIS RECORDING Studio recording issued by Deutsche Grammophon. The sound recording is in the public domain in the European Union: the fifty-year term of protection for phonograms expired before the 2013 term extension came into force, so the extension did not apply to it. Mozart's music itself has been in the public domain for well over a century. Audio restoration for this upload: subsonic rumble from the source transfer was removed with a 24 dB/octave high-pass filter at 28 Hz, and groove clicks were repaired. No broadband noise reduction was applied — the original high-frequency detail is untouched.