This report is almost identical in wording to the story printed in the Salzburger Intelligenzblatt, 7 Jan 1792 (Neue Folge, 81); it was also printed in the Graz Zeitung für Damen und andere Frauenzimmer on 18 Jan 1792 (Dokumente, 526). However, this version published on 27 Dec 1791 in Der baierische Landbot now becomes the earliest known source for the story.

The Landbot, published four times a week, was a short-lived venture edited by the playwright Joseph Babo (1756–1822) and the lawyer Felix Lipowsky (1764–1842), both multi-faceted individuals with interests in the arts, law and politics. The editors chose to make this anecdote the opening item in the issue of 27 Dec 1791, followed by another concerning Dante. Both the Salzburg and Graz papers printed both anecdotes in the same order, suggesting either that the Landbot was their ultimate source or that all three derive from a common ancestor. How did this information about the Requiem travel from Vienna to Munich barely three weeks after Mozart’s death? It is entirely possible that the editors of the Landbot were themselves reprinting the anecdote from some early source still unidentified. But it should be noted that Lipowsky was a practised musician and composer himself, who later produced the valuable Baierisches Musik-Lexikon (1811); perhaps he had a correspondent in Vienna who had learned this information from a source close to the Mozart family.

Due to his evident interest in the Requiem, Lipowsky may be considered a candidate for the authorship of the anonymous obituary from Munich of the tenor Benedikt Schack, which infamously transmits the story of the “deathbed rehearsal” (Dokumente, 459–60, cf. 532–33).

This item was first publicly noted in Black (2009). It is also noted independently in Keefe (2012), 14.