The Lubbock Symphony Orchestra will perform the Verdi Requiem at the Buddy Holly Hall on Oct 15. Tickets may be purchased here. Below are the program notes I wrote for the concert.
Pianse ed amò per tutti (He wept and loved for everyone)
Gabriele D’Annunzio
On the occasion of Verdi’s death
D’Annunzio (a poet and playwright) understood that Verdi’s subject was ultimately not kings, courtesans, gypsies, jesters, or Moorish generals. It was mankind. Giuseppe Verdi’s Messa da Requiem occupies a unique place in the musical literature. It is a setting of the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead, yet it is also unmistakably the work of the greatest Italian operatic composer of the nineteenth century—perhaps the greatest of any time or place. Monumental in scale, intensely theatrical in expression, and extraordinarily demanding of its four soloists, chorus, and orchestra, the Requiem confronts death not with serene detachment but with terror, grief, supplication, and finally an uncertain hope for deliverance.
Verdi thought that 19th-century Italy had produced two cultural giants – Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868) and Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873). The former literally invented 19th-century Italian opera. He produced a sound so new and inventive that Europe literally went Rossini-mad. Even Beethoven was jealous of the attention Rossini’s operas received. The latter produced the great Italian novel I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed), which is renowned not only for its literary merit but also for helping establish contemporary Florentine as the principal model for standard modern Italian. This linguistic transformation began with Dante and ended six centuries later with Manzoni. That Manzoni was a Lombard but chose to write in Florentine sealed the language deal.
When Rossini died in 1868, Verdi, usually the most practical of great composers, got the hair-brained idea of honoring the first anniversary of his fellow composer’s death with a requiem mass written by 13 different Italian musicians—each to write a separate part of the whole mass. The piece was completed (Verdi wrote the Libera me) but not performed until more than a century later. After Manzoni’s death (May 22, 1873), Verdi proposed to the mayor of Milan that he, and only he, write a requiem mass to commemorate the first anniversary of the author’s death. Manzoni was born and died in Milan. The mayor readily assented. Manzoni’s funeral had been held in Milan Cathedral. The San Marco church was chosen for the Requiem’s premiere because of its size and acoustics. As the work’s premiere was held in a church, the audience could not applaud or show their appreciation for the piece. When the Requiem was performed at La Scala three days later it received a tumultuous reception.
At this point in his life Verdi considered himself retired. He was a rich man and was devoting most of his time to the management of the huge estate he had acquired outside of his hometown of Busseto. But he was a practical man; so he took his requiem on the road. He led performances in Paris, London, Vienna, Cologne, and later Milan, making even more money in the process.
The initial reaction to Verdi’s mass was mixed. Wagner hated it, but he hated anything by any living composer other than himself. Some criticized it for being too operatic. To know why the Verdi Requiem turned out the way it did, you must understand its composer’s approach to music. Verdi said that he had to write for the theater. Accordingly, almost all his compositions are operas. Furthermore, there are no gods or goddesses and almost no magic in them. They are filled with people subjected to the same emotional stresses as their audiences, and Verdi depicts them in music of striking aptness. That is why these characters remain so compelling.
Verdi’s artistic focus was on those emotions and states of consciousness common to all of humanity. Love, hate, anger, jealousy, the relationship of parent to child, the clash of private and public obligations – all fill his works. His response to the great concerns expressed in the requiem text was therefore inevitable; it was certain how he would react to the greatest concerns of human beings depicted so vividly in the text of the Catholic Requiem Mass – death, eternal judgment, damnation, salvation, the fate of our souls. He had the greatest libretto he could ever find. And he rose to this challenge with a musical cyclone unique in liturgical music.
Verdi approached the ancient Latin text with precisely the dramatic imagination that had made Rigoletto, La traviata, Don Carlos, and Aida masterpieces of the theater. Yet the Requiem is not simply an opera without scenery. Its drama is internal. The protagonist is humanity itself, standing before death and judgment. Its initial stillness is shattered by the most famous music in the score—the Dies irae, the Day of Wrath. Four blows from the full orchestra announce catastrophe. The chorus erupts with terrifying force as Verdi depicts the Last Judgment not as an abstract doctrine but as an immediate physical reality. Bass drum, brass, and blazing orchestral sonorities create one of music’s most overwhelming evocations of fear.
The Dies irae returns repeatedly throughout the work, functioning almost like a recurring memory of judgment that cannot be escaped. Around it Verdi constructs a succession of sharply contrasted episodes. In the Tuba mirum, trumpets positioned both onstage and at a distance summon the dead from their graves. In the Mors stupebit, the bass soloist contemplates death itself standing astonished before the Judge. The mezzo-soprano and soprano join in the grave, searching Recordare, while the tenor’s Ingemisco brings one of the work’s most recognizably operatic moments—a lyrical plea from the individual sinner for mercy.
The bass aria Confutatis maledictis moves between images of the damned consigned to flames and the singer’s quiet prayer to be counted among the blessed. Then, almost without warning, the Dies irae returns with renewed violence.
The sequence reaches its emotional center in the Lacrimosa. The Day of Judgment has become a day of tears. Instead of cosmic terror, Verdi gives us human sorrow. Soloists and chorus join in music of extraordinary simplicity and pathos, ending with an “Amen” that seems less an affirmation than an exhausted appeal for mercy.
The Offertorio provides a striking change of atmosphere. The four soloists sing largely without the chorus, their intertwined lines creating a chamber-like intimacy. Here Verdi’s writing becomes contemplative, even luminous, as the souls of the departed are commended to God.
The Sanctus, by contrast, bursts forth with dazzling energy. Written as a brilliant double fugue for chorus, it demonstrates that Verdi—sometimes condescendingly portrayed by contemporaries as merely a man of the theater—possessed complete command of the most rigorous contrapuntal techniques. Yet even here scholarship never becomes academic display. The music dances with joy.
In the Agnus Dei, soprano and mezzo-soprano sing an austere melody first in bare octaves, answered by the chorus. Its almost archaic simplicity is among the score’s most haunting effects. The Lux aeterna, entrusted to mezzo-soprano, tenor, and bass, offers a darker and more mysterious vision of eternal light.
Then comes the final Libera me, the section whose origins predate the rest of the work. The soprano stands almost alone before the abyss: “Deliver me, O Lord, from eternal death on that awful day.” The chorus responds. The terrifying music of the Dies irae returns one final time, as though the fear that has haunted the entire work can never entirely be banished.
Verdi then does something extraordinary. The chorus launches into a great fugue on the words Libera me. The music gathers momentum and confidence, seemingly moving toward a triumphant conclusion. But Verdi refuses to provide one. The fugue collapses. The soprano returns, repeating her plea in a whisper. The chorus joins her almost inaudibly, and the work ends not with certainty but with supplication.
That ending tells us much about Verdi’s conception of the requiem. He was not conventionally devout, and the work offers none of the serene assurance found in many sacred compositions. Its deepest subject is the human response to mortality—the instinctive fear of extinction, the grief of those who remain, and the desperate hope that death may not be the final word.
As mentioned above, the Verdi Requiem was composed when Verdi thought his operatic career was over. Ironically, this was the time when the great British composer Benjamin Britten later said that the aging Verdi seemed to have “discovered the secret of perfection.” Always a ferociously hard worker, Verdi put everything his skill and great experience could muster into what he thought would be his last major work. Of course, two more masterpieces Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893) were still ahead of him.
Verdi’s mass is unlike any other requiem. It is a sacred opera and makes no attempt to sound “ecclesiastical.” Its connection to the listener is direct and immediate. Verdi’s failure to conform to what was expected of sacred music was the cause of contemporary criticism of his mass. After its initial success the Requiem was regularly, but not frequently, performed over the next 50 years.
The Verdi Requiem can only be compared with a non-musical work – Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. Both are overpowering and evoke awe, though Verdi seems to offer a bit more hope than his fellow countryman from Florence. Verdi’s God is more forgiving and sensitive to the failings of humanity, though the horror of his Dies irae is without musical precedent.
Though the Verdi Requiem is liturgically correct, the requirement of a chorus, four soloists, and a large orchestra, plus its length (about 90 minutes), has ensured that it is typically performed in the opera house or concert hall rather than in a church. The Met didn’t get to it until 1901. The company has performed it 57 times since then. The last was in 2023. It is probably the most frequently performed major choral work composed since Mozart’s Requiem.
The theatrical power of the Requiem has sometimes led critics to question whether it is truly religious music. The distinction would probably have meant little to Verdi. His operas repeatedly address the most fundamental matters of human existence: love, loss, guilt, sacrifice, injustice, and death. In the Requiem those concerns are concentrated into a single overwhelming confrontation with mortality.
Few composers could make the terror of judgment so frightening, the grief of the Lacrimosa so immediate, or a whispered prayer so compelling. Verdi’s Requiem does not ask its listeners merely to contemplate death. It makes them experience, for roughly ninety minutes, the fear, sorrow, grandeur, and hope with which human beings have always faced it.
In the Requiem, Verdi gathered into a single work the qualities that made him one of the supreme artists of the nineteenth century: his incomparable melodic gift, his instinct for drama, his compassion for human suffering, and his ability to speak directly to an audience’s deepest emotions. The Mass may be Catholic in text, but its reach is universal. Its terror is the terror of death; its grief is the grief of loss; its pleas for mercy express humanity’s ancient hope that death is not the final word. Verdi offers no easy reassurance. The final Libera me subsides not into triumph but into an urgent, whispered appeal for deliverance. That uncertainty is precisely what makes the work so profoundly human. D’Annunzio’s words quoted above are perhaps the simplest and truest description of the composer who gave voice to humanity’s hopes and sorrows.
