Requiem feature

For whom the bell tolls

“I am not fond of useless things. There are so many, many Requiem Masses!!! It would be pointless to add one more.”

Verdi’s apparently final and irreversible answer to the question whether he would write a Mass for the Dead was provoked by a letter from an admirer who had seen the score of his recent setting of the Libera me - “the most beautiful, the greatest, and most colossally poetic piece that can be imagined” - and was clearly eager for more of the same. What Verdi should have told him, to keep his options open, was that it all depends on who’s dead. It is true that he was not interested in composing sacred music for its own sake: before the Libera me, he had written nothing of the kind for more than thirty years. But to commemorate a great Italian he might make an exception. In a way, indeed, he already had.

That “colossally poetic” Libera me was Verdi’s contribution to a Requiem on which he and eleven other Italian composers had collaborated after the death of Rossini in 1868. The idea was that the composite work would be given a ceremonial performance in San Petronio in Bologna - “Rossini’s true musical home,” according to Verdi - on the first anniversary of that unhappy event. Far from being a reluctant contributor to this weird project, Verdi was actually its originator. Rossini’s reputation, “the most popular and widespread of our time,” he had declared, “was a glory of Italy!” Amazingly enough, under the direction of a specially formed committee, the Messa per Rossini did get written on time. Less amazingly, it did not get performed in Bologna in 1869, or anywhere else in the lifetime of the composers involved in it.

In his eulogy of Rossini as “a glory of Italy” Verdi had added, “When the other one who still lives is no more what will we have left?” The other one was Alessandro Manzoni, author of I promessi sposi (The Betrothed), a novel Verdi described as “not only the greatest book of our epoch but one of the greatest ever to emerge from a human brain.” He adored Manzoni like no other living person. When he met him in 1868 he said he “would have knelt before him, if men could be worshipped.” Five years later Manzoni died, in Milan, at the age of eighty-eight. “I am profoundly saddened by the death of our Great Man!” Verdi wrote to his publisher Ricordi, “But I shall not come to Milan, for I would not have the heart to attend his funeral. I will come soon to visit his grave, alone and unseen, and perhaps (after further reflection, after having weighed my strength) to propose something to honour his memory.”

Having visited Manzoni’s grave, as promised, Verdi wrote again to Ricordi: “I would like to demonstrate what affection and veneration I bore and bear the Great Man who is no more… I would like to set to music a Mass for the Dead to be performed next year for the anniversary of his death. The Mass would have rather vast dimensions, and besides a large orchestra and a large chorus, it would also require four or five - I cannot be specific at this stage - vocal soloists.”

The decision to go ahead with the Requiem cannot have been easy for a composer who, if not actually atheistic, was almost certainly agnostic - his only god, he once said, was Shakespeare - and who definitely did not like the Church. On the other hand, there were many good reasons, quite apart from his resolve to honour Manzoni, why he should devote himself to a Requiem at this stage in his career. When he had completed Aida in 1871 he had thought (wrongly, as it turned out) that he would write no more operas and he had already branched out in a new direction with his String Quartet in E minor - which, incidentally, had called for some of the same contrapuntal skills as he would need in a large-scale choral work. A Requiem Mass would be a great challenge but at least the text does not include the Credo, which might well have put him off altogether.

More immediately to the point, in writing the Libera me for the Messa per Rossini Verdi had also, as a necessary consequence, made a start on two other sections of the Requiem. The Libera me is not always included in a Requiem Mass but, when it is, it comes last. Since the text of the Libera me recalls the words of the both the Dies irae and the opening Requiem aeternam, this means that a composer has the opportunity to recall the music that goes with them in a kind of recapitulation. In the Libera me for the Messa per Rossini, however, having no idea what his colleagues had written, Verdi couldn’t recapitulate and had had to invent new music for these backward allusions But now that he had the Requiem all to himself he could expand the Requiem aeternam and Dies irae sections of his Libera me and make them the first two movements of the new work.

Given that start, Verdi completed the Manzoni Requiem in a matter of months, reflecting with more than a little irony that “when I hear operas spoken of now, my conscience is scandalised and I immediately make the sign of the Cross!!” When he came to make arrangements for the performance his new-found piety did not extend, however, to accepting the Church’s ban on female voices, which would have ruined everything. He had chosen San Marco in Milan for its acoustic and was lucky that the parish priest there was ready to intercede with the Archbishop on his behalf. Permission was eventually granted providing that “the women be hidden by a grating off to one side or something similar” and that they wore “a full black dress with the head covered by an ample mourning veil.”

The first performance of the Messa da Requiem per l’anniversario della morte di Manzoni 22 maggio 1874, to give the work its full title, did actually take place in San Marco on the day appointed, though not as a work of art in its own right but as part of a liturgical ceremony. Had it been given in a concert hall - or in a church without a plainchant Mass interpolated between the movements, as on this occsion - it would probably not have proved as offensive as it evidently did to some members of the congregation. While most critics came out in favour of the Requiem, Hans von Bülow was one of those who deplored the theatrical orientation of the work, denouncing it as an “opera in church vestments.” It was an extreme point of view (Brahms disagreed, declaring that “only a genius could write such a work”) but it did represent one side of an argument that still goes on, though with less passion and in more academic terms these days.

In his excellent little book on the Verdi Requiem, David Rosen argues that the score is not, by the composer’s standards, operatic. But does it really matter? While Verdi stipulated that “one mustn’t sing this Mass in the way one sings an opera,” he did not suppress his gift for expressive vocal melody: the ‘Lacrymosa,’ which is not the most operatic episode, is actually based on a duet originally intended for Don Carlos. The tenor soloist’s ‘Ingemisco’ would not have been out of place in the same opera. While he demonstrated his contrapuntal skill, most brilliantly of all perhaps in the double fugue in the Sanctus, he did not renounce the theatrical effect of the off-stage trumpets in ‘Tuba mirum.’ At the other dynamic extreme, the instrumental colours accompanying the short bass solo, ‘Mors stupebit’ - the stunned strings, the dull thud of pizzicato basses and quietly struck bass drum - are the inspiration of a great opera composer.

But Verdi was not just a great opera composer: he was a great composer. There is nothing more sensational in any choral work than his setting of the opening lines of the Dies irae, an apocalyptic sound visited on us four times in all. The last time, in the Libera me, its searing heat fuses together the disparate elements of a uniquely many-sided work into an integrity all its own.

Gerald Larner©2003