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Published: Sunday, 17 November 2024 at 16:18 PM
Music’s most powerful Requiems: how composers have explored death and the afterlife
‘I think it has to be Brahms,’ replies composer Michael John Trotta, when asked by BBC Music to name his favourite Requiem. ‘It’s partly to do with how he brought the language into the vernacular and included additional texts. And then there’s that ticking at the beginning – “bom, bom, bom” – along with the vulnerability of the viola. I also remember singing the “How Lovely is Thy Dwelling Place” movement as a schoolboy and feeling enveloped by the music’s warm hug!’
But soon afterwards Trotta, who has recently completed his own Requiem (see p48), changes his mind. ‘I wish I had answered Mozart for my favourite Requiem,’ he emails. ‘There’s something about how he both acknowledged and transcended tradition…’
It was, of course, an unfair question. From Dufay and Ockeghem in the 15th century to Karl Jenkins and Rebecca Dale in the 21st, many of music’s most accomplished and popular composers have written Requiems. Of those, several are considered masterpieces. How do you choose from such a list?
The title ‘Requiem’ comes from ‘Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine’ (‘Grant them eternal rest, O Lord), the first sentence of the Introit of the Catholic Mass for the Dead. Standardised in the mid-16th century by the Council of Trent (which was looking nervously over its shoulder at the rise of Protestantism), the sections of the Requiem Mass – Introit, Kyrie, Gradual, Tract, Dies Irae Sequence, Offertory, Sanctus, Agnus Dei and Communion – provided a basic framework for settings to music, with composers omitting parts, adding other material and elaborating the format as they saw fit.
And it’s this spirit of elaboration that has brought about such a wide range of Requiems over the centuries, in terms of tone – from blood and thunder to gently acquiescent (see rating guide, below) – style, length, performing forces and, not least, the words. In fact, as our look at some of the best known and most groundbreaking examples reveals, the theme of death is about the only thing they all have in common…
Most famous Requiems: rating guide
Most famous Requiems
Tomás Luis de Victoria
Officium Defunctorum (Requiem) (1605)
The first of the great Requiems? The Spanish composer wrote his setting for six voices – he’d also written one for four voices 20 years earlier – in response to the death of his boss, the Dowager Empress María, choosing to omit the mass’s Dies Irae (Day of Anger) Sequence of texts as he did so.
Added to the front, however, was ‘Taedet animam meam’, setting an ultra-gloomy moment from the Book of Job, while the work is rounded off by the funeral motet ‘Versa est in luctum’ and the responsory ‘Libera me’. Each section of this immaculately crafted, stunningly expressive work is prefaced by a section of plainchant which – listen closely – you can then hear paraphrased in the second soprano line.
Blood and thunder rating:
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Requiem in D minor (1791)
Forget those stories of Mozart’s Requiem being commissioned in the dead of night by a dark, mysterious stranger and all. Intriguing, but bumph. What we do know is that the composer’s handwritten score suddenly breaks off in the eighth bar of the devastating ‘Lacrimosa’, the sixth movement in the Dies Irae section – this is the point at which he died.
Of the work we know today, only the Introitus was written in full by Mozart, the rest left in various states of incompletion or not even begun. Though scholars like to pick holes in the completion of Mozart’s Requiem by his pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr, the latter did at least present something that is admired for its precision, structure, ingenious interaction between voices and instruments and, of course, sheer beauty.
Blood and thunder:
Hector Berlioz
Grande Messe des morts (1837)
When Berlioz was invited to compose a Requiem Mass in honour of the soldiers who had died in France’s 1830 Revolution, he thought big. Very big.
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The resulting Grande Messe des morts (Great mass for the dead) is scored for an enormous orchestra that includes no fewer than 16 timpani and four off-stage brass ensembles.
A mere 400-or-so performers gave the work’s premiere at Les Invalides in Paris in 1837, but the composer gave instructions for what to do if a choir of up to 800 singers was involved. While Mozart had liturgical performances in mind, Berlioz took the Requiem very much into the realm of the concert showpiece, with the Dies Irae’s ‘Tuba Mirum’ its earth-shattering tour de force.
Blood and thunder:
Johannes Brahms
A German Requiem (1868)
Confirmed in a Lutheran church as a boy, Brahms stuck a metaphorical red pen through the Catholic Mass and went in search of his own texts. His Ein deutsches Requiem features words from across the Old and New Testaments, sung in his own language – accessibility was the key for Brahms, who suggested that his work could just as easily have been titled Ein menschliches Requiem (A Human Requiem).
The ominous funereal tread of ‘Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras’ aside, Ein deutsches Requiem presents a largely benign view of death and the afterlife, beginning with ‘Blessed are they that mourn’ from the Beatitudes and ending with ‘Blessed are the dead’ from the Book of Revelation.
Blood and thunder:
Giuseppe Verdi
Messa da Requiem (1874)
Verdi had no time for such warm words of comfort. ‘We’re doomed!’ is the general gist of his Requiem, a work spurred on by the death of the novelist Alessandro Manzoni.
Introduced by terrifying thwacks of the bass drum and cascading chorus, the huge Dies Irae section dominates a Requiem that throughout leans towards the theatrical – with its demanding, dramatic solo parts, little wonder that conductor Hans von Bülow initially described it as ‘Verdi’s latest opera, though in ecclesiastical robes’.
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Among the pleas for mercy and dark forebodings comes a brief chink of light in the ‘Tuba Mirum’ brass fanfare – a moment sampled by Take That in 1995 in their No. 1 hit ‘Never Forget’.
Blood and thunder:
Gabriel Fauré Requiem in D minor (1890)
Verdi’s hell-and-damnation Requiem centres on the Dies Irae; Fauré leaves it out entirely. No surprise, given that this is the handiwork of a composer who, describing death as ‘a joyful deliverance’, said his aim was ‘to stray away from the established path after all those years accompanying funerals’ and even told a friend that he composed it ‘for pleasure… if I may be permitted to say so!’
The Frenchman tinkered no end with his Requiem between first setting pen to paper in 1887 and producing the final version for soloists, choir and symphony orchestra in 1900. It was performed at his own funeral in 1924, and moments such as the soprano’s beatific ‘Pie Jesu’ remain as popular as ever 100 years on.
Blood and thunder:
Herbert Howells
Requiem (1932)
What prompts a composer to write a Requiem? Specific commissions aside, in some instances the loss of a loved one provides the impetus – Brahms, for instance, began his shortly after his mother died. It was largely believed that Herbert Howells composed his Requiem in response to the death of his nine-year-old son Michael… until recent research showed that the work predated that tragedy.
Combining Latin and English texts from the Psalms and the Latin Mass, the 20-minute work creates its sense of contemplative stillness by means of unaccompanied four-part choir plus two soloists – a world away from Berlioz’s and Verdi’s aural assaults by percussion and brass.
Blood and thunder:
Maurice Duruflé
Requiem (1947)
Long before even Dufay and Ockeghem came on the scene, the Mass of the Dead enjoyed a musical existence in the form of Gregorian chant. It is these chants that form the bedrock of Duruflé’s Requiem, their melodies heard clearly yet wrapped up in the French composer’s own distinctive harmonic language.
Like Fauré, Duruflé chose to omit the Dies Irae from his Requiem which, notwithstanding the impassioned ‘Pie Jesu’ mezzo solo, has a similarly acquiescent feel. Scored for either organ or orchestral accompaniment, it is the Requiem with the least likely (and most controversial) genesis – Duruflé initially set to work on it in 1941 in response to a well-funded competition set up by the collaborationist Vichy regime.
Blood and thunder:
Benjamin Britten
War Requiem (1962)
Never one to refrain from throwing a hissy fit, Britten approached the premiere of his War Requiem at the new Coventry Cathedral in May 1962 by taking issue with the chorus, the orchestra, the chamber ensemble, the concert programme notes, the cathedral’s clergy… and the building itself. He also thought little of the performance, though the work proved an instant hit both with the critics and those listening in on the radio.
Large-scale in terms of both length and performing forces – soloists, chorus and orchestra, plus a separate chamber orchestra and boys’ choir – the War Requiem broke new ground by interspersing the sections of the Latin Mass with poetry by Wilfred Owen, killed in the last days of World War I. And for all those vast forces on stage, moments such as ‘Strange Meeting’, sung by tenor and baritone soloists, are equally intimate and poignant.
Blood and thunder: