The 'religion' of Mozart's Requiem and aesthetic autonomy in its early reception

This paper attempts to identify how Mozart's Requiem came to be regarded as an aesthetically autonomous work. By exploring reception in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in conjuction with the emergence of the movement of Kunstreligion and of the 'musical work', this paper proposes that Mozart's Requiem played a key role in the ontological shift of how musical works were received.

Originally presented at BFE/RMA Research Students' Conference Bangor 2016. Text unchanged from original 2016 form except for typography and style corrections.