GIUSEPPE VERDI
Requiem
That a man who was by all reports an
agnostic should have written one of the most effective pieces of
sacred music in the repertoire might give us pause. But if Verdi's
Requiem is not exactly what Rome might have ordered, it has become
lodged in the Western imagination as an expression of the 19th
century's new view of faith as being an intensely personal affair.
While using the trappings of the liturgically flexible Roman
Catholic Mass for the Dead, Verdi's masterpiece pushed sacred music
beyond extremes of expression already approached in Bach's St.
Matthew Passion, Beethoven's Missa solemnis, and
Berlioz's Grande messe des morts.
A Transcendent Work
The Messa da Requiem per l'anniversario della morte di Manzoni
22 maggio 1874, to cite Verdi's full title, was composed
ostensibly in memory of the great Italian author and nationalist
Alessandro Manzoni. Although it was clearly more than the sum of
its parts, the work also transcended the cliché, established early
on, of an "opera in ecclesiastical garb," to cite conductor Hans
von Bülow's misguided early appraisal of the piece. Further, its
qualities go beyond merely being "the summit of 19th-century
liturgical music," in Julian Budden's phrase, to which the Verdi
expert acceded that there was not much competition.
More than that, the Requiem represented a sea-change in the way
Europeans, and ultimately Americans along with them, viewed their
bargain with religion. It strayed further from the rituals of
liturgy than Mozart or Rossini had, into a realm where the politics
of 19th-century Italian church-and-state divisions mingled with the
European mind's growing sense that each individual had to find a
way to faith through a struggle that might or might not have
anything to do with traditional religion.
The Requiem was by general agreement the work in which Italy's
greatest composer concentrated his musical energies most
effectively and explosively. Quite apart from the question of
whether the Requiem is Verdi's "greatest work," it is at least the
piece into which the composer poured "all the purely musical
resources that he had developed in the course of 26 operas," as
Budden summarizes, "and which he could here exploit to the full
without having to take into account the special [demands] which a
stage action inevitably imposes."
The Work's Genesis
The Requiem came about through a sporadic course of events, whereby
Verdi—who had all but decided that Aida of 1871 would
be his last opera—began reevaluating his artistic mission. The
Italy of the 1870s was a period of great change, with the
nationalist movement in politics giving way to decentralized and
corrupt leadership, and the musical scene becoming gradually
"Germanized," to use Verdi's word for the influx of works like
Wagner's Lohengrin and the presence of musicians like
Liszt and Bülow. Sacred music, it went without saying,
languished.
It was Rossini's death years earlier that sparked Verdi's first
attempt to take part in composing a requiem: When the elder
composer died in 1868, Verdi had proposed a plan in which the
leading composers of the day would each contribute a movement to a
requiem, which would be performed on the anniversary of Rossini's
death. Intrigue on the part of the conductor and impresario Angelo
Mariani would ultimately foil the plan, but not before Verdi had
already composed his contribution, the Libera me, a revised version
of which became the final movement in his own Requiem five years
later.
During the ensuing years, when friends began hinting that Verdi
should take up a requiem, the composer seemed to resist the idea,
while implicitly admitting that he had entertained the notion. "It
is a temptation that will pass like so many others," he wrote to
conductor Alberto Mazzucato in February 1871. "I do not like
useless things. There are so many, many Requiem Masses!!! It is
useless to add one more."
Despite these overemphatic words, some speculate that Verdi might
have been contemplating such a work already in 1873, after his
publisher, Giulio Ricordi, returned to him the score of the unused
Libera me, then (apparently) planted a letter in the Gazzetta
musicale di Milano that urged Verdi to "give new life to
sacred music, now fallen to such a low point."
In any event, it was Manzoni's death a month later, on May 22, that
activated Verdi's resolve to complete the piece. "I am profoundly
saddened by the death of our great man!" he wrote to Ricordi of the
man whose writings represented the goal of Italian linguistic and
national unity. "Now it is all ended!" he wrote subsequently to
Clara Maffei. "And with Him ends the purest, the most holy, the
highest of our glories." In Verdi's eyes, Manzoni so represented
the ideals of 19th-century Italian nationhood that some have
speculated that what Verdi was ultimately composing was a "Requiem
for the risorgimento"—the Italian national "awakening"
that had found such powerful resonance in the composer's art and
imagination.
A Requiem Goes Out into the World
The notion of "operatic" sacred music was hardly new with Verdi.
Just to look at the 19th-century Italian sphere, Donizetti (in his
Requiem composed to honor Bellini) and Rossini had both set
precedents for writing religious music that was essentially
informed by operatic style. Beethoven's Missa
solemnis certainly has operatic qualities, and moreover
Budden argues that works like Bach's Christmas
Oratorio or Handel's Messiah are
essentially operatic in outlook. (Scholar David Rosen also points
to the sacred works of Cherubini and Berlioz as probable influences
on Verdi's large-gestured approach.)
But Verdi's remains a work of sacred music to its core, despite a
certain dispassionate approach to the strictly liturgical aspects
of the text. While scored for four soloists with chorus, it does
not turn the singers into characters playing roles—at least not in
any traditional sense. There is a certain "depersonalized" aspect
to their involvement, to use Budden's word, as they speak at times
to the general narrative and at other times, obliquely, as
individual supplicants seeking mercy. The way in which the soloists
are used is atypical as well: Mozart had employed the soloists in
his Requiem generally as a quartet; Cherubini used no soloists at
all in his two Requiems, while Berlioz only a single tenor in one
movement.
In his choice of texts, Verdi put a personal stamp on the requiem,
too. There is no one requiem text: Composers choose from a basic
core liturgy and can add sequences and other texts. Nevertheless,
the goal of a requiem is generally always the same, as George
Martin points out: to evoke in the listener a sense of peace. To
the basic texts, Verdi added the Libera me and expanded the Dies
irae.
The score for the Requiem was
composed chiefly in Paris, Sant'Agata, and Milan from the latter
part of 1873 to the spring of 1874. "I'm working on my Mass and
doing so with great pleasure," the composer wrote to Camille du
Locle. "I feel as if I've become a solid citizen and am no longer
the public's clown who, with a big tamburone and bass
drum shouts 'come, come, step right up', etc. etc. As you can
imagine, when I hear operas spoken of now, my conscience is
scandalized, and I immediately make the sign of the Cross!!"
It was complete by April 16, 1874, and the venue for its premiere
set for the Church of San Marco, Milan—partly because Verdi
favored its acoustics. The performance took place on May 22, a year
after Manzoni's death according to plan, and three more
performances followed during the next week. It was a popular if not
wholly a critical success at its early performances: The most
notorious initial criticism—Bülow's celebrated attack—was in
general the exception to the rule.
In any event, Johannes Brahms came out in Verdi's defense: "Bülow
has made an almighty fool of himself. Only a genius could have
written such a work." (Two decades later, the conductor withdrew
his condemnation, which had reportedly been based on a cursory view
of the score.) Further successes continued to underscore the work's
special nature in Paris and at the relatively new Royal Albert Hall
in London. It was at the latter, on May 15, that a new version
appeared for the first time, with the "Liber scriptus" fugue turned
into a solo for mezzo-soprano. The Londoners were nevertheless
lukewarm about the piece, whereas in Vienna the success was "into
the torrid zone," as Giuseppina Strepponi, Verdi's wife,
observed.
The official United States premiere took place in the Academy of
Music in New York on November 17, 1874, under the baton of a former
Verdi pupil, Emanuele Muzio. (A previous performance in October had
preceded this at St. Ann's Church in New York, with a chorus of 20
and organ accompaniment.)
From the outset, Verdi had emphasized that the piece was not to be
performed in an overly operatic style. "One mustn't sing this Mass
in the way one sings an opera," he wrote, "and therefore phrasing
and dynamics that may be fine in the theater won't satisfy me at
all, not at all." Indeed, as Rosen points out, Verdi was especially
pleased with the Paris renderings because they were less
"theatrical" than the barn-storming Italian performances.
The forces used in these early performances varied a great deal, as
Rosen has shown: The Milan premiere employed a chorus of 120 and an
orchestra of about 100, though on other occasions Verdi authorized
much larger forces, most outlandishly a performance at Royal Albert
Hall, which featured—according to the testimony of the organist for
the performance—a chorus that was 1,200 strong. Moreover, the
original performances were sometimes broken by applause, and
sometimes numbers were even encored. An intermission usually
followed the Dies irae.
A Closer Listen
The Requiem begins with an initial Requiem aeternam cast in A-B-A
form, with the opening portion introducing the mournful thematic
material and a central section formed by the "Te decet hymnus." In
the first full-throated cry for mercy ("Kyrie"), the composer
introduces his soloists as if they were characters in a drama. The
entreaty moves upward in a bone-tingling registral expansion
achieved by the soloists ascending successively while the
accompaniment descends. Critic Donald Francis Tovey called this
"the most moving passage in all Verdi's works; unquestionably one
of the greater monuments of musical pathos."
The Dies irae finds Verdi at his most ferocious. The composer has
turned the 13th-century text by Thomas of Celano into a huge
structure with almost unprecedented extremes of emotion-from
hand-wringing cries for mercy to hysterical fears of doom. The
initial onslaught is equaled in Verdi's output perhaps only by the
opening storm scene of Otello composed several years
later. The subsequent Tuba mirum becomes a terrifying antiphony of
orchestral and off-stage (or often balconied) trumpet players; here
Verdi is at his most theatrical: The slap-dash
risorgimento choruses of his operas have been
transformed into something close to what we might imagine the last
trumpet(s) could indeed sound like. In the shattered silence that
follows, the bass is dazed ("Mors stupebit"), the mezzo imperious
("Liber scriptus").
The chorus softly intones "Dies irae" to remind us of the terror
before the brief trio of soprano, mezzo, and tenor (Quid sum miser)
introduces the entreaty of a single sinner pleading for mercy, as
it were. This sets up an ongoing contrast between the narrative
cries of all Christians ("Dies irae") with the increasingly
personal plea of real individuals, expressed by the soloists singly
or in combination.
The immutability of God's power (Rex tremendae) is offered as a
response to the plea for salvation, which seems little comfort to
the soprano and mezzo-soprano (Recordare), who sing a tender
operatic duet. Likewise, the tenor's tormented Ingemisco is
answered by the bass's stern Confutatis. A fierce "Dies irae"
reprise ushers in the emotional high-point of the section, the
plangent lament of the Lacrymosa, filled with sigh-motifs and a
sort of inexorable forward-motion. In this case, the operatic
nature of the piece is overt: It is derived from a duet composed
for the opera Don Carlos but discarded before its
premiere.
After so much high-decibel gnashing-of-teeth, the Offertorio comes
as a welcome moment of serenity, and ushers in a more tranquil
series of movements. The "Domine Jesu" grows from a solo cello
theme heard toward the beginning, which moves into a short-lived
fugue ("Quam olim Abrahae"). More emphatic still is the double
fugue of the Sanctus, which together with the "Benedictus" is set
as a continuous contrapuntal texture broken only by the simpler
textures of the "Pleni sunt coeli." The Agnus Dei is built from a
plainchant-like theme in octaves; with the Lux aeterna for
soloists, conflict arises again, but is quickly dispelled in a
shimmer of B-flat major.
The Libera me plunges us back into the intense personal drama of
the Dies irae, "as though someone had said the wrong thing and God
suddenly appeared," in George Martin's formulation. This is
essentially the same Libera me as that composed in 1869 for the
Rossini Requiem, though with some elaboration of the vocal part—"a
revealing but not radical revision of the piece," as Rosen writes.
The choral interpolations of the "Requiem aeternam" and "Dies irae"
have been taken to suggest that Verdi intended even then to expand
the Rossini Requiem into a full composition some day. The emphatic
fugue is a momentary gesture in a piece that concludes the Requiem
on a note of tranquility and, finally, uncertainty.
—Paul J. Horsley