All Souls’ is a celebration that commemorates the dead. Not surprisingly, there are loads of great pieces linked with death – our own or that of a loved one. One of my favorites is “Bring Us, O Lord God”, a setting of a prayer for a peaceful death by the poet and priest John Donne, composed by the English cathedral musician William H. Harris.
I’m said before that Mozart wrote the Requiem against which all others are judged. I’ve also mentioned how the intense emotions of that piece foreshadow a big change in musical style between the 18th and 19th centuries. Mozart’s is a masterpiece, classical in balanced form and romantic in dramatic execution. But what if we dump that balance and go straight for the feels – specifically, the OMG-I’m-afraid-to-die day-of-judgment fire-and-brimstone scared-out-of-my-wits feels?
Enter Giuseppe Verdi, the revolutionary composer who helped Italian Opera stay on the map. His Requiem IS an opera; the emotional drama is as chilling as Othello, heart-wrenching as Traviata, dark as Rigoletto. When we hear about the day of judgment, we are scared. We are very very scared. And when Verdi’s angel sounds the trumpet (at 2:25, “Tuba Mirum”), it makes me want to cower under my desk. Mozart’s Tuba? not so much. Makes me want to do a Mr. Bean dance.
Kudos to the performers here for having A LOT of singers in the choir, so the brass could play at full-volume!
The music is scary up until 4:10, at which point it’s the conductor’s face which is scary.
I’ve written about Mozart‘s Requiembefore – how it has become the Requiem by which we judge all other Requiems. The music runs the gamut of musical expression, and you could argue that it’s unabashed display of dark emotions foreshadows the end of the classical era and the beginning of the romantic.
The work is shrouded in mystery and legend. This is largely the fault of Mozart’s widow Constanze, who started spreading lies about the piece the day after Mozart died. This wasn’t completely her fault – if word got out that the piece was unfinished at the time of his death, she wouldn’t receive the payment for the work. She secretly had some of Mozart’s students finish the composition; to this day there is disagreement as to who finished which movements. She was aware that the person who commissioned the work might try to pass it off as his own music (the person was famous for doing so.) But, she also claimed that Mozart was poisoned and that he knew he was writing his own funeral music. That’s just good for business.
However, it’s important to note that in general, human beings like to make legends out of things they love, even if the legends end up being gross exaggerations of the truth. For example, he didn’t get tossed into a pauper’s grave, he had a regular middle-class tomb. His burial was not unattended, and there was no dark storm that day.
Like yesterday’s post, there is much scholarship surrounding this work, so it’s fair to say we know what parts Mozart wrote and which parts were finished by another composer. Even if it’s not 100% Mozart, it’s still a marvelous work, and the dark circumstances surrounding it add to its mysterious flavor. Listening to the Dies Irae, I can’t help but feel that Mozart was genuinely afraid of his own death.
Recent Comments