PROGRAM NOTES

Verdi worked on his Messa da Requiem from 1873 to 1874, and conducted its first performance on 22 May 1874. In the composer’s list of works, it lies between Aida (1871)and Otello (1886). The Requiem is scored for soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor and bass soloists, chorus (usually in four parts, though in eight in the Sanctus), and an orchestra of three flutes (with piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, four bassoons, four horns, four trumpets, two pairs of off-stage trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, and a full complement of strings.

Giuseppe Verdi composed his Messa da Requiem to be premiered on the first anniversary of the death of Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873), the man considered by many to be Italy ’s greatest writer after Dante. Verdi had revered Manzoni since the age of sixteen, when he read the historical novel I Promessi Sposi for the first time. The novel, one of the most widely read books of the nineteenth century, virtually invented a national literary language out of many regional Italian dialects and, therefore, played a key role in the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy from many disparate states. To Verdi, Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi(The Betrothed) was “not only the greatest book of our epoch, but one of the greatest ever to emerge from a human brain. It is not only a book, but a consolation for humanity.” After the first meeting of the two artists in 1867, the anticipation of which terrified the younger man, Verdi wrote to Clarina Maffei, friend of Manzoni and the person who, with Verdi’s second wife, Giuseppina Strepponi, had conspired to bring the two great men together, “What can I say? 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 before him if we were allowed to worship men. They say it is wrong to do so, and it may be, although we raise up on altars many that have neither the talent nor the virtue of Manzoni and indeed are rascals.”

Verdi’s use of the word ‘saint’ is likely to have held only poetic, not religious, meaning, since he was a dedicated agnostic throughout his life. Unlike Manzoni, who had pulled away from the Church but late in life professed a belief in God that seemed largely rooted in a fear of what an afterlife might bring (“What will happen to me?” he wrote), Verdi never professed any Christian faith. Strepponi, herself a Christian, wrote, “For some virtuous people a belief in God is necessary. Others, equally perfect, while observing strictly every precept of the highest moral code, are happier believing in nothing. Manzoni and Verdi! These two men give me food for thought...”

Verdi’s incendiary political ideas celebrating the man in the piazza, ideas that he developed again and again in his operas, troubled the authorities. The Roman Catholic Church, only a few years after the composer’s death, declared that music should be governed by the spirit and rules of Gregorian chant or of pure counterpoint, and that theatrical music was inappropriate in the Church. But it was less likely the political leanings and the musical language than the unwillingness of the irrepressibly popular Verdi ever to profess any faith that primarily inspired the Church’s distrust of the Messa da Requiem. While the first performance of the Requiem did happen in the Church of San Marco in Milan (the women singers hidden from sight and veiled), the work thereafter took its place in La Scala and in the concert halls; there it remains firmly settled today, even while religious works of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms continue to thrive both outside and inside the church. While Hector Berlioz’s 1837 Grande Messe des morts and the later Mass in G minor of Ralph Vaughan Williams are both strong religious works by strong doubters, there may be no more passionate and committed a telling of a sacred text by a non-believer than Verdi’s Requiem.

It is Verdi’s telling of this text that captures the listener, telling that pretends nothing and that flows from his belief that “success is impossible for me if I cannot write as my heart dictates.” Arguments about whether the Requiem is, as Hans von Bülow claimed, Verdi’s “latest opera in church vestments,” have raged among listeners and critics—and not just inside the Church, where the question seems settled—ever since the work’s first performance. On the one hand, Verdi seems to have anticipated such an argument by warning that, “one must not sing the Mass as one sings an opera, and therefore the coloriti (phrasing, accents, dynamics) that may be good for the theater will not be to my liking at all.” He later praised a performance of the Requiem for the performers’ willingness to sing with the requisite variety of attacks and to sing piano as well as forte. So, it is clear that Verdi expected a level of musical sophistication that he was not accustomed to receiving in the theater. Such were not just standards to be met; they signaled a different approach and point of view.

Moreover, Verdi’s construction of the work suggests, in many ways, a non-operatic composition. Thematic and motivic links, some apparent and others less so, help to unify the movements in ways that may not always be necessary—though are by no means always absent—in the organization of an opera. During the first movement of the Requiem, invocations of the contrapuntal voice of Palestrina (who was, to Verdi, ‘in primus et ante omnes’, the Church notwithstanding) hark back more to religious than to theatrical music. And the very skillful fugal writing (almost the entire Sanctus and the final Libera me) has its roots in many non-operatic antecedents—Mozart, Cherubini and Beethoven. In these respects, the Messa da Requiem is perfectly conceived concert music.

On the other hand, Verdi’s approach to his musical forces suggests something wholly different than do the Ninth Symphony and Missa Solemnis of Beethoven, even at their most theatrical. Verdi frees his four vocal soloists in unprecedented ways; although he often has them sing in quartet, he also gives them music that invites each to be an individual who mourns, fears and exalts. The line, however fine, that lies between the singer and the words-music, that line that every performer seeks to erase, had never before been so thoroughly absent from the score of a religious work. While the soloists are, in the first pages, linked to each other by musical imitation, each develops into a full and independent, if unnamed, character who reveals something quite personal about living in the vacuum that death brings. Even when the unaccompanied soprano and mezzo-soprano sing in octaves at the beginning of the Agnus Dei, they do not so much invoke the Gregorian chant as pray together through this ancient voice—lonely, unprotected, fearful—and cling to each other as we all do when we stand and sing hymns. The chorus and orchestra’s answer (is it an answer or an echo?) and the angelic weaving above waft by unnoticed by the two women, but the final ominous dona eis of the chorus’s men makes them collapse into each other’s arms.

Verdi’s chorus is not an objective force; nor is it a Greek chorus, commenting upon what it observes. Instead, it is the volatile crowd of people who, overwhelmed by their loss, pray, shout and wail. At the beginning, they are barely able to mutter their words. Later, with a stunning inability to shake their own fear, they cry out (Dies irae) in anticipation of their own death—as Manzoni had. During the disheveled funeral procession (Lacrimosa), they weave unstably behind the mother, the sister, the widow, barely able to keep in step with the bass drum that, itself, is unable to hold the beat. Soloists and chorus often seem unaware of each other, and the crowd occasionally absorbs the individuals in its ragged ranks, the relationships among all shifting as fluidly as the mourners move; all give in, without even the feign of stoicism, to their swirling feelings. In this extreme moment, no one sees or trusts the inevitable beyond, and any hope of greater understanding is as likely to be dashed as to be nurtured. All speak in the first person, singing and playing not so much for the dead, but for themselves who, at once, grieve and fear for their own salvation.

Verdi’s rearrangement of the funeral text, so that the Dies irae (Day of Wrath) music interrupts other sections of text several times, and that the Requiem closes with the Libera me (Free me), are unconventional decisions that emphasized his own religious doubts. But they also provided him with a powerful narrative thrust that no other composer seems to have sought. His Requiem was not designed for the predictability of a religious ritual; instead, it unfolds with all of life’s emotional unpredictability and confusion. The obsessive and unanticipated returns of the apocalyptic Dies irae (words that the Church would eventually de-emphasize in its liturgy); the soprano and chorus who, at what could seem to be the closing pages, give comforting voice and heart to the barren, unspoken orchestral music that opened the work; the final determined return to the personal plea, Libera me, instead of the more expected, outward reaching Lux aeterna; and the palpable uncertainty with which the entire Requiem closes, all shape the human drama of this Requiem in ways that could have sprung only from a composer who had composed one instrumental work (the String Quartet) and twenty-seven operas. Verdi wrote, “I am not a learned composer, but I am a very experienced one.” Into this work, he poured all of that experience that had taught him how to reveal, and connect to, the human heart.

As many have suggested, perhaps with too much ease, Verdi’s Requiem may be his greatest opera among his many great operas. And, it may be quite the opposite, an astoundingly powerful and personal honoring of just one man that, in its stubborn refusal to embrace an accepted religious view, becomes a universal source for any listener seeking for answers to the most mysterious questions that the composer did not even try to answer. Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B minor, through its extraordinary theology-music marriage, opens its doors for listeners who share little or nothing of the composer’s faith. Conversely, Giuseppe Verdi’s Messa daRequiem, composed by a man who said that “to have faith is good, but not to rely on faith is better,” offers the deepest spiritual understanding of fear and hope, even to one who might share little of the composer’s disbelief.

— David Hoose