Among the most dramatic, and therefore the most familiar incidents of Mozart's life, is the strange story of the anonymous commission he received to write a Requiem Mass. We are sure now that it was Count Walsegg who wished to palm off the composition as one of his own. To Mozart, however, there was something uncanny in the whole matter, and he could not work off the suspicious dread that the death-music he was writing was an omen of his own end. Shortly before his father had died, Mozart had written him a letter begging him to be reconciled to death when it should come, and speaking of death as "this good and faithful friend of man," and adding: "I never lie down at night without thinking, young as I am, that I may be no more before the morning dawns." Constanze, having been away for the cure at Baden, returned to find him suddenly declining in health. To divert him, she took him for a drive, but he could talk only of his death and of his morbid conviction that he had been poisoned. Constanze, greatly alarmed, called in the family physician, Doctor Closset. He blamed Mozart's state to overwork and overabsorption in the composition of the Requiem Mass, which he toiled at and brooded over until he swooned away in his chair. After a brief recovery of spirits, he sank rapidly again and could not leave his bed. Constanze attended him devoutly, and her younger sister, Sophie, and her mother, now much endeared to Mozart, were very solicitous and attentive. It is Sophie who described in a letter the last hours of this genius, who died at the age of thirty-five. Mozart, even in his ultimate agonies, was most solicitous for his wife, and said to Sophie that she must spend the night at the house and see him die. When she tried to speak more cheerfully, he would only answer: "I have the taste of death on my tongue; I smell the grave. And who can comfort my Constanze if you do not stay here?" Sophie went home to tell her mother, and Constanze followed her to the door, begging her, for God's sake, to go to the priests at St. Peter's and ask one of them to call, as if by chance. But the priests hesitated for some time, and she had great difficulty in persuading one of "these unchristian Fathers" to do as she wished. After a long search the family doctor was found at the theatre, but he would not come until the end of the piece, and then ordered cold applications to Mozart's feverish head, which shocked him into unconsciousness. He died at one o'clock in the morning of November 5, 1791, and the last movement of his lips was an effort to direct where the kettledrums should be sounded in his Requiem. The ruling passion!