March 31 Program Notes
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Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901)
Requiem MassRequiem Masses have long served as a way for nations to bereave their public figures. Cherubini paid tribute to Louis XVI with such a Mass in 1817, and Berlioz wrote a Mass in 1837 for those who died at the Battle of Algiers.
The genesis of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem Mass comes from the same impulse, but it was Gioachino Rossini that Verdi originally planned to honor, not the Mass’s eventual dedicatee, Alessandro Manzoni.
Rossini died on November 13, 1868, and Verdi was disconsolate. "A great name has disappeared from the world," he wrote. Four days later, he proposed a Requiem Mass to his publisher, a work to which he and other Italian composers would contribute individual movements.
Numerous stipulations attended Verdi’s proposal, among them that the Mass would be performed first in Bologna, that after the performance the score would be placed in the Liceo Musicale, only to be brought out for Rossini’s anniversaries, and, finally, that a committee would decide upon the composers, arrange the performance, and watch over the progress of the work.
The committee was formed and the work was completed (with Verdi providing the final movement, Libera me), but music by committee is not always the optimum way to proceed, and the project was fraught with conflict. The end came when the head of the Bologna Teatro Communale refused to make his singers and orchestra available.
Once the dust had settled, Verdi was done with the idea. "[Completing the Mass] is a temptation that will pass like so many others," he wrote to committee member Alberto Mazzucato. "I do not like useless things. There are so many, many Requiem Masses!!! It is useless to add one more." The score for the Libera me was returned to Verdi on April 21, 1873.
A month later, Alessandro Manzoni died, arguably the one man for whom Verdi would resurrect his plans for a Mass.
At that time, few authors enjoyed the vast popularity of Alessandro Manzoni. The leading Italian writer of the Romantic age, he was read by his countrymen as fervently as Dante and was regarded by Verdi as a pillar of Italian culture.
Verdi’s first encounter with Manzoni came at age 16, when he read the author’s "I promessi sposi." Verdi thought the work was "not only the greatest book of our epoch, but one of the greatest ever to emerge from a human brain."
Verdi had set some of Manzoni’s works to music, although they were works that, according to the composer, "would never see the light of day." He also met Manzoni, and was overcome with the force of the author’s presence. In a letter to his friend Clarina Maffei, he wrote, "How to describe the extraordinary, indefinable sensation the presence of the saint, as you call him, produced in me. I would have gone down on my knees if we were allowed to worship men."
Verdi did not attend any official ceremonies connected with Manzoni’s death, ("I would not have the heart to attend his funeral") but ten days after Manzoni died, Verdi privately visited the author’s tomb, and came away with a desire to commemorate Manzoni with a Requiem.
He began work on the Mass in summer, 1873, while staying in Paris. Although Verdi was not religious (said his wife, "I won’t say he’s atheist, but certainly not much of a believer, and with such an obstinacy and a calm that makes you want to thrash him"), he found great pleasure in composing the work, and by April he was done with what he called, one assumes with tongue-in-cheek, "that devil of a Mass."
Not surprisingly,, Verdi took an iconoclastic approach to the work. In general, Masses are rather malleable in form. Throughout ecclesiastical history, emphasis has been placed in successive eras on both rejoicing and grieving, on the glories of heaven and the terror of damnation. Verdi couldn’t help but invest his own unique experiences into the project.
"The text," George Martin writes, "is ambiguous enough to allow musicians, by emphasizing this or that part or individual lines, to create a Mass that was primarily joyful or lamenting, majestic or simple, reflective or apocalyptic. Verdi, being a man of the theater, chose to make it drama."
Explicitly dramatic settings for the Mass are uncommon, but for Verdi to write otherwise would be a gesture of insincerity on his part. Palestrina may have been one of Verdi’s heroes, but he wasn’t necessarily a model for his composition. One might think of the Requiem Mass as an oratorio, then, in Francis Toye’s words, a "sacred opera on the subject of the last judgement with Manzoni’s soul as the objective theme." Parallels between the Requiem and Aida are testimony to the deep feelings Verdi had for Manzoni, not a desire to theatricalize a sacred occasion.
Scored for four soloists, chorus, and orchestra, the Mass begins quietly with the Requiem e Kyrie, cellos introducing a distillation of the theme followed by a chain of suspensions in five parts. Verdi follows the lead of Mozart in linking the Requiem and Kyrie together, and, as David Rosen points out in his authoritative work, "Verdi’s Requiem," the a cappella scoring, imitation, and severe melodic material all indicate a far distance from the operatic tradition.
Solo voices enter with the Kyrie, a movement that Donald Tovey considered one of Verdi’s most moving passages, "one of the greater monuments of musical pathos."
The Dies irae follows. Memorials throughout the first millennium of Christendom emphasized the joy of life everlasting, yet included the Dies Irae as a warning. The emphasis in the Mass on the terrors of the Last Judgement, the suffering of hell and damnation, tend to wax and wane with the theological emphasis of the church, however. In 1874, the passage was required. Today, though, by a 1969 Papal decree, the Dies Irae is no longer required to be sung at a Requiem Mass.
The movement starts with four chilling, exclamatory thunderclaps, followed by rapid scales. By turns solemn and disturbing, mournful and guilt-ridden (particularly in the Confutatis maledictis section), the movement concludes with subtle underlying tutti chords.
The Offertory, a plea for deliverance and mercy, is presented with comparative serenity, the terror having passed. Dark and haunting moods make their appearances, but sporadically. The Sanctus is written as a fugue for double chorus, and moves along briskly, with fortissimo shouts of "Sanctus" capturing the exultant character at the onset.
Again modeling the work of Mozart, Verdi separates the Agnus Dei and the Lux aeterna as separate movements. The Agnus Dei is lightly scored, with a dynamic variation that doesn’t move above piano. After the Lux aeterna, the work concludes with the Libera me, the movement originally composed for Rossini. Opening with a soprano solo in plainsong, the chant gives way to a declamatory plea. The chorus once again invokes the "Day of Wrath" in frantic disruption, before the movement eventually surrenders to a mood that Tovey describes this way: "Force has failed; only the appeal to mercy remains, now so abject that it is spoken rather than sung." We are left not with a resolute affirmation, but with a question.
Verdi’s "Messa da Requiem per l’anniversario della morte di Manzoni" received its premiere at St. Mark’s in Milan, May 22, 1874.