Program Notes: Verdi Requiem

GIUSEPPE VERDI
Requiem 
BORN: Roncole, Italy, October 9 or 10, 1813 
DIED: Milan, January 27, 1901 
COMPOSED: 1868-74 
WORLD PREMIERE: May 22, 1874, in Milan, conducted by the composer. 

What to Listen For: 

• More than conventional ecclesiastic compositions, Verdi's Requiem encompasses a vast range of musical expression, from the quiet intoning of its opening plea for eternal rest to its spine-chilling announcement of the Day of Judgement and the raising of the dead. The use of off-stage trumpets in the latter passage is a particularly inspired theatrical detail. 

More than conventional ecclesiastic compositions, Verdi's Requiem encompasses a vast range of musical expression, from the quiet intoning of its opening plea for eternal rest to its spine-chilling announcement of the Day of Judgement and the raising of the dead. The use of off-stage trumpets in the latter passage is a particularly inspired theatrical detail. 

Giuseppe Verdi's Requiem straddles two musical traditions, ecclesiastic composition and 19th-century Italian opera. Sacred music and opera normally have little in common. The former is, at least traditionally, restrained and discreet, given to strict contrapuntal writing, free from ostentatious instrumental color or vocal extravagance. Opera, by contrast, is all about unconstrained dramatic and emotional expression, not to mention brilliant vocal display.  

Verdi was, of course, one of the greatest opera composers, an instinctive dramatist with a genius for portraying conflict, character and, above all, heightened emotion through music. And not just any music. Verdi inherited, indeed, he embodied the Italian love of lyricism, of sensually beautiful and intensely expressive singing. These qualities drew him naturally to the theater, for which he composed nearly all his major works. His Requiem is the most significant exception. 

Yet this composition departs only slightly from the conventions of 19th-century Italian opera that Verdi brought to such impressive culmination. His writing for four solo singers makes demands, and produces glorious sounds, comparable to the leading roles of La traviata, Aida and others of his operas. And the way the composer uses both orchestra and chorus here also has parallels in his operatic works. In fact, the music of this Requiem is quite thoroughly operatic. The wonder is that it also constitutes a self-evidently profound and sincere spiritual document. 

That last point merits some discussion. Verdi's relationship with the Catholic Church was complex and problematic. Like nearly all Italian children of his time, the composer had been brought up in the Church. He attended a parish school, sang in the local church choir and served as an altar boy. But from an early age, Verdi rebelled against clerical authority.  

According to a story the composer often recounted in his later years, he was assisting at a mass one day when he was 7 years old when he became distracted by the playing of the church organ. Entranced by the music, he failed to hear the officiating priest ask for the containers of ritual water and wine. When he failed to respond, Verdi received a cuff on the head that knocked him to the floor. Struggling to his feet, the humiliated boy cursed his assailant, shouting "May God strike you with lighting." (Ironically, four years later, the tormenting priest was one of six people killed by lightning in a particularly violent thunderstorm.) 

Verdi's distrust of clergy remained with him all his life, and he seemed to many who knew him to be a confirmed agnostic. Even his wife, the singer Giuseppina Strepponi, was exasperated by his apparent lack of faith. "Everyone agrees," she once wrote of Verdi, "that ... he's the soul of honesty, he understands and feels every noble and delicate sentiment; yet for all that, this brigand allows himself to be, I won't say an atheist, but certainly not much of a believer, and all with a calm obstinance that makes you want to thrash him." 

Nevertheless, Giuseppina acknowledged that while her husband displayed indifference to the letter of Church doctrine, he instinctively upheld its spirit. Writing to another correspondent, she ventured that "there are some highly virtuous people who need to believe in God; and there are others, no less admirable, who are quite happy to believe in nothing at all, while rigorously observing every strict moral precept." Her husband, she understood, exemplified the latter type of person.  

In contrast to his lukewarm feelings for the Church, however, Verdi was ardent in his patriotism. The causes of Italian nationalism and the glorification of Italian culture were sacred to him, and he venerated freedom fighters, such as Garibaldi, and those artists whose work he regarded as essentially and purely Italian. Two creative personalities were especially important to Verdi: Gioacchino Rossini, his predecessor as the foremost composer of Italian opera; and Alessandro Manzoni, the writer and statesman whom Verdi called "The Saint." The passing of each of these men inspired Verdi's major sacred composition, the great Requiem, which may accurately be heard as a patriotic as well as spiritual statement. 

Rossini died in November 1868. Verdi, while not personally familiar with the composer of The Barber of Seville and William Tell, had long regarded Rossini "a glory of Italy," as he told a correspondent, and he now conceived a unique tribute to the late musician's memory. According to Verdi's idea, 13 of Italy's leading composers would contribute movements to a requiem mass to be performed on the anniversary of Rossini's death. Verdi himself set about writing the closing Libera me. Alas, this project ran aground on the shoals of ruffled vanities and personal dissension. Verdi briefly considered completing the mass himself, but he had important opera commissions to fulfill, not the least being the creation of Aida to commemorate the opening of the Suez Canal. 

Five years later, however, the death of Manzoni prompted Verdi to revive his idea for a requiem mass. The author of novels, plays, and poetry, Manzoni was Italy's leading man of letters during the first half of the 19th century. He was also an ardent supporter of the struggle for Italian independence and unification, as was Verdi. On June 3, 1873, the composer wrote to his publisher: "I would like to show my love and esteem for that Great Man [Manzoni] ...  I would like to compose a Messa da morto to be performed next year on the anniversary of his death. This mass would be of quite vast proportions ..." 

Unlike the projected mass for Rossini, this plan came to splendid fruition. Using the Libera me and sketches for a Dies irae he had completed for the abortive Rossini memorial, Verdi completed his Requiem in April of 1874, and directed its first performance in Milan on May 22, one year after Manzoni's death, just as he had intended.   

Audience reaction to the work proved enormously favorable, both in Milan and at subsequent performances that Verdi led in Paris, London, Vienna, and Germany. Some critics, however, were distressed at the overtly theatrical character of the music, a reaction with ample historical precedent. Handel's Messiah, for example, had been castigated on precisely the same grounds. Among those hostile to the work was the pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow, an acolyte of Verdi's great contemporary Johannes Brahms. Perhaps thinking he was defending Brahms's A German Requiem against an Italian rival, Bülow wrote an article deriding the piece as Verdi's "latest opera, though in ecclesiastical vestments." A succinct rebuttal came from Brahms himself. "Bülow has made an almighty fool of himself," the German composer said after becoming acquainted with Verdi's Requiem. "Only a genius could have written such a work." 

There is no denying the music's operatic quality. But what escaped Bülow and other critics is that the composition's most overtly dramatic moments also provide its most moving and even devout passages. The whirling tumult of the Day of Wrath (Dies irae), for example, or the majestic trumpet summons at the words "Tuba mirum" convey a terrifying vision worthy of those in the biblical Book of Revelations. Theatrical they may be, but they are neither unconvincing nor sacrilegious. As already noted, Verdi was by nature a dramatic composer, and it was natural for him to interpret the mass's descriptions of Final Judgment in highly dramatic terms.   

Indeed, it seems unlikely that Verdi could have written a large sacred composition in any other manner. While unusual works like his String Quartet show a musician of considerable breadth, Verdi was best able to express himself in the emotionally charged style of Italian opera. With his Requiem, he showed that this idiom could transcend its usual milieu and serve the most serious religious purpose. As such, the work glorified the musical language of Italian Romantic opera and the nation for which such music is a prime cultural emblem. But beyond this, Verdi's Requiem also stands as an honest spiritual testament from a man who habitually conceived and described his thoughts and experiences in powerful, direct and, yes, theatrical terms.   

Paul Schiavo © 2022