Mozart wrote his Masonic Funeral Music in October 1785 for two noble men, Georg August von Mecklenburg-Sterliz and Count Ferenc Esterházy, who were Mozart's fellow lodge members. He was initiated into the lodge on December 14th 1784, where he became first an “apprentice” before progressing to the next step in the hierarchy. By the end of the year, he was an “assistant”. Mozart took his membership seriously in an organisation that sought to benefit intellectuals and high ranking noblemen. So it is no surprise that we can find allusions to Freemasonry in many of Mozart's compositions. The most famous are the Masonic elements in the Magic Flute, but we find them in other compositions written or performed in his last year: in August 1791, his Masonic Cantata (K 471) was performed in Prague, and on November 18th, he conducted a new work, the Small Masonic Cantata (K 623). A couple of days later he took to his sick bed, never to rise from it.
Mozart virtually created an independent musical style with his Masonic music. The Catholic church, the traditional user of ritual music, was strongly opposed to the movement, so the absence of received traditions for ritual music must have fired Mozart's imagination. For all this, there are numerous elements which derive from Catholic rituals in Mozart's Masonic music. Symbols expressed in music become independent elements: the use of the number three in its various relations (e.g. triple time rhythm), parallel passages and linked pairs of notes (symbolising brotherhood), as well as the use of certain instruments (basset horn and clarinet). The Masonic music's four and a half minutes and 69 bars falls into three sections as well. The outer sections are celebratory, and set in C minor, which in subsequent eras became associated as the tonality of pathos and grief. The central section is in the closest major key, E flat. An interesting feature of the central section is Mozart's use of a medieval “tonus pellegrinus”, or wandering melody, which was part of the Easter Catholic liturgy, and it recurs in much other funeral music (including Mozart's own Requiem) The work's tragic tone is fitting for the circumstances, but in spite of similarities, must not be confused with the world of the Requiem. When Mozart wrote this music, he was enjoying his greatest period of popularity and success, and was still a few brief years away from his appalling decline.