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Verdi’s Requiem

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Giuseppe Verdi (molto bello!)

I wrote about Giuseppe Verdi’s monumental Requiem for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra back in November, and it seems that I never posted my notes for this stunning performance. Either that or the WordPress searchbots are lying to me, and I’m experiencing short-term memory loss, both possibilities I would prefer not to contemplate.

At any rate, here are the notes I wrote, which can also be found on the DSO website, if you click around and expand some menus and so forth. Or you could just read them here.

Verdi’s Requiem

by René Spencer Saller

Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901): Messa da Requiem

I asked a friend, Patty Kofron, a versatile mezzo-soprano who has sung Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem several times, to describe the experience from the performer’s perspective. “I don’t know if I can express how much more it is than the complexity of the double choruses, or the beauty and terror of the music,” she said. “When I sing the ‘Libera me,’ I feel like I am personally begging God to spare me from eternal damnation… and I’m not even religious. It’s the most powerful thing I’ve ever sung or will ever sing. As much as I love the Brahms, Fauré, Mozart, and other requiems, the Verdi puts my own mortality and my maker right in my face.”

You don’t need to be singing to feel a similar rush. You don’t even need to believe in God. Despite its obvious Judeo-Christian framework, its churchy fugues, and its incense-steeped Latin trappings, this Requiem deals more with the secular than the sacred. For long, delectable stretches, if you tune out the Latin text and simply let the melodies wash over you unmediated, you might convince yourself that you’re listening to a love duet or an arietta, perhaps a quartet backed by large chorus or some showstopper from one of his recent operas. Indeed, Verdi finished Aida, a commission to honor the Suez Canal, in 1871, a few years before the first performance of the Requiem; the two scores share a similar intensity, a dark grandeur bleeding into raw emotion. 

No wonder the Requiem appeals to the nonreligious: Verdi himself was often accused of agnosticism. His second wife, Giuseppina Strepponi, described the composer’s spiritual outlook as a matter of temperament: “Everyone agrees that …he’s the soul of honesty, he understands and feels every noble and delicate sentiment; yet for all that, [he] 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.”

Everyone who loves Verdi’s Requiem has a favorite part. The concluding “Libera me” gets most of the attention, and deservedly so, but highlights abound. Sometimes it’s the glittering majesty of the “Sanctus” that satiates my brain’s pleasure centers; sometimes it’s the intimate, chamber-music bliss of the “Lux aeterna.” But the Requiem is more than the sum of its parts, and most of its power is cumulative. When the unstoppable “Dies irae” theme returns, it hits us like a sucker punch: we can’t escape our certain deaths. All we can do, awaiting judgment, is express our all too human selves. 

Verdi does more than resurrect the Requiem form: he re-humanizes it, bringing the drama back to individual sinners with enormous needs: for grace, for redemption, for eternal peace, or at least an escape from hellish torment. The singers are relatable in the same way that opera heroes and heroines are relatable: larger than life but fatally flawed. 

Late-Life Superachiever

Over a six-decade career, Verdi wrote 28 operas, easily half of them masterpieces. He produced many of his greatest works when he was in his 70s, at a time when 60 was considered old. He was still at the peak of his powers when he died, on January 27, 1901, a few days after suffering a massive stroke. To this day his funeral ranks as the largest public assembly ever recorded in Italy.

Beyond his genius for indelible melodies, Verdi was a master dramatist. A devotee of Shakespeare, Schiller, Byron, and Voltaire, he read widely and deeply, always on the hunt for the next opera plot. He worked closely with his librettists to ensure minimal flab and maximal feeling. In the world according to Verdi, rage and terror rule, desire redeems and destroys, and the tenor loves bravely forever. 

He was born in Le Roncole (now known as Roncole Verdi), in a rural area then under the control of France. Although he liked to call himself a peasant, his parents were innkeepers, with enough disposable income to pay for his private organ lessons at age four. During his adolescence he lived in Busseto with a patron’s family, growing close to the patron’s daughter, his music pupil. After he failed the entrance examination for the Milan Conservatory, his wealthy future father-in-law paid for three years of private composition lessons.

In 1836, two months after Verdi was appointed director of Busseto’s Philharmonic Society, he married Margherita Barezzi, his patron’s daughter. They had two children, both of whom died as babies. In 1840, a year after the successful premiere of his first opera, Oberto, Verdi’s 26-year-old wife suddenly died, probably from encephalitis. His next effort, a comedy, was a flop, and he considered giving up. But in 1842, Nabucco, his third opera, became the first in a long series of overlapping hits, launching the 29-year-old composer’s international career and securing his fame. 

It was during rehearsals for Nabucco that Verdi met his second wife: the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi, who stepped into the role of Abigaille at the last minute and saved the production. Verdi and Strepponi invited scandal by living together “in sin” (technically, in Paris, Busseto, and finally an estate in Sant’Agata, in his ancestral Parmesan countryside). They married in secret in 1859, and the union lasted until her death, in 1897; Verdi died a few years later. 

At his funeral, thousands of mourners lined the streets while Arturo Toscanini conducted a 900-voice choir in the “Va, pensiero” chorus from Nabucco. Although Verdi was first buried in the Cimitero Monumentale, in Milan, his remains were relocated to the crypt of the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti, a retirement home for musicians that Verdi had founded.

Roots of the Requiem

In 1868, soon after the death of Gioachino Rossini, whom he revered, Verdi pitched a kind of compilation Requiem in honor of the late composer to his publisher, Tito Ricordi, with the various parts supplied by himself and a dozen of Italy’s other leading composers. Verdi composed the final “Libera me.” The memorial mass was not performed in 1869, as originally scheduled, the first anniversary of Rossini’s death. The complete compilation version of the work wasn’t debuted until 1988. 

In 1873, at Verdi’s request, Ricordi returned the “Libera me” score, around the same time that the Italian novelist and poet Allesandro Manzoni died. Verdi’s grief over the loss of Manzoni, a hero of the Risorgimento (the 19th-century Italian unification movement), likely compounded the grief he felt for Rossini. Whatever the source of these strong emotions, Verdi sought expression in the elegiac: he decided to complete the remaining movements of the Requiem—everything save “Libera me,” which he revised significantly. He spent the summer of 1873 composing, or reverse-engineering, a complete Requiem. He believed in the project so strongly that he spent his own money printing the sheet music for the first performance, which he conducted, at the Church of San Marco, in Milan, on May 22, 1874. 

Verdi’s Requiem translates the ancient Latin mass for the dead into the vernacular of Italian opera. Ferocious and crude as a gut punch, tender and transcendent as a kiss, Verdi’s Requiem revels in the dramatic, or at least doesn’t refute the charge lobbed by the conductor Hans von Bülow, who dismissed Verdi’s Requiem as “his latest opera, in ecclesiastical vestments.”

Johannes Brahms, Bülow’s close ally and associate, disagreed. “Bülow has made an almighty fool of himself,” Brahms said after taking in Verdi’s Requiem. “Only a genius could have written such a work.”

Verdi, for his part, tried to distinguish his Requiem from his previous works for the stage. “One mustn’t sing this Mass in the way one sings an opera,” he explained, “and therefore phrasing and dynamics that may be fine in the theater won’t satisfy me at all, not at all.”

Theatricality aside, Verdi taps into the divine by way of the carnal. All the best evangelists understand the link between the loins and the great hereafter. As for theological matters, he was an agnostic and loath to get too preachy. Maybe that’s why his lead quartet often sounds like pairs of lovers singing to other lovers. He understood divine mercy through his art, those melodies that sear our souls like sudden truths. 

In Memory of Two Great Men

Verdi’s “Libera me” was originally written to honor Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868), the composer Verdi once called “a glory of Italy.” Verdi called Manzoni’s 1827 novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) “not only the greatest book of our epoch, but one of the greatest ever to emerge from a human brain.”  He called Manzoni himself a “saint.” 

Later, when Manzoni died at age 88—coincidentally, the same age at which Verdi himself would die almost 30 years later—he remembered his contribution to the compilation Requiem and realized that he could build upon this promising foundation.

On June 3, 1873, Verdi wrote to Ricordi of his plans: “I too would like to demonstrate what affection and veneration I bore and bear to that Great Man who is no more, and whom Milan has so worthily honored. I would like to set to music a Mass for the Dead to be performed next year on 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 principal singers…. I would have the copying of the music done at my expense, and I myself would conduct the performance both at the rehearsals and in church.” 

Verdi asked Ricordi to obtain permission from the mayor of Milan. After the project was approved, Verdi got to work. By using the music that he had written for the earlier compilation Requiem, he would need only about an hour’s worth of additional music to frame and complete it. He composed the settings for a multipart “Dies irae” and other sacred texts, and finished it on April 10, 1874. He printed the score at his own expense, as promised, and conducted the first performance in Milan on May 22, one year after Manzoni’s death. Verdi’s original title: “Requiem Mass for the anniversary of the death of Manzoni, 22 May 1874.”

Varieties of Requiem

Technically speaking, a Requiem refers to a musical setting of the Latin Mass for the Dead. Sometime after 1450 and possibly as late as 1470, the Franco-Flemish composer-turned-priest Johannes Ockeghem wrote an early, incomplete polyphonic rendition, minus the Sanctus, Agnus Dei, and Communion. Many significant Requiem settings followed, from the 15th century onward, including Mozart’s iconic unfinished composition from the months, indeed hours, leading up to his death in 1791. Closer to Verdi’s time, Luigi Cherubini composed a stellar pair (1816 and 1836), and Hector Berlioz contributed another even more famous one, sometimes called the Grande Messe des morts (Great Mass of the Dead; 1837). Verdi would have been familiar with all those composers’ works, although his own Requiem was less rooted in the liturgical.

Verdi responded to the Latin text by locating its emotional core, the dramatic significance of each singer’s moral confession. He offers no comforting lies, no confident speculation. Let other composers traffic in the theological; Verdi’s heart is with the human: the soprano, pleading in terror for her salvation, sinful but shining, shining. The tenor, the mezzo, the bass-baritone: all kissed by the holy, implicated and yet innocent. 

A Closer Listen

I. In the opening movement, an appeal on the behalf of the recently departed for a peaceful rest, the chorus sings from the perspective of the mourners. Prefaced by austere low strings, the singers begin with the standard lines “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine” (Grant them eternal rest, O Lord), which the chorus and orchestra intone with a hushed gravitas. Verdi translates the Lord’s promise of endless light into the luminous language of late Romanticism, turning a grief-laden hymn into an operatic anthem. The four solo singers join the chorus and orchestra for a jubilant “Kyrie eleison” (Lord have mercy).

II. The doomy and demonic second movement, the nine-part “Dies irae” (Day of Wrath), slashes and burns through a terrifying series of scenarios wherein the sinners individually confront their wretched souls. What awaits us after death? Eternal perdition or a joy so perfect that the most celestial fugue can only approximate it? The singers roar, wail, whisper, shriek, and hiss; the orchestra invests each scene with the appropriate mood and color. 

The “Dies irae” is based on a poem about Judgment Day commonly attributed to Thomas of Celano, a 13th-century Franciscan monk. In his setting of the ancient text, Verdi squires us through all the stages of grief. Against punishing bass drum and shrieking piccolo, and preceded by apocalyptic brass fanfares, the choristers describe the day that fire consumes the world. Verdi’s melodies do 90 percent of the persuasion, and his Technicolor scoring does the rest. Only a robot could resist the “Recordare,” in which the soprano and the mezzo-soprano sing a lustrous Mozartian rhapsody. Other highlights include the godlike trumpet fanfare of the chorus-driven “Tuba mirum”; the sensuous grip of “Liber scriptus”; the delicate, wind-driven pastorale of “Quid sum miser”; and the pathos-drenched “Lacrymoso,” for solo quartet and chorus, the sinner’s tearful plea for salvation.

III. The solo quartet sings the “Offertorium,” a light-rinsed, lullaby-like testament to the creator’s tender mercies. Here the four singers describe the holy radiance that God promises to bestow on Abraham and his descendants.

IV. The “Sanctus,” a resplendent double fugue for two choruses, is sung from the angelic perspective: divinity casting a fond downward glance at the suffering humans. The angels’ joy seems almost explosive, in contrast to the anguish of the human characters: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord of Hosts! Heaven and earth are filled with your glory!” 

V. Against spare orchestral accompaniment, the chorus, the soprano, and then the mezzo-soprano sing the “Agnus Dei”: “Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, grant them rest.” 

VI. Sometimes a cappella and sometimes accompanied by shimmering strings and delicate winds, the mezzo-soprano, tenor, and bass deliver the luminous prayer “Lux aeterna” (Light eternal). The violins are divided into six parts to enhance the celestial effect.

VII. The soprano returns, with chorus, for the transcendent “Libera me,” which redirects our attention to the singular terrified sinner. On one level, you can appreciate the final movement as an aria, a gracefully emotive outpouring of bel canto splendor. At its climactic midpoint, the soprano’s high C rips through the chorus to remind us of her individual suffering. The chorus responds, a soothing balm made of light. A wild fugue develops, jagged with accidentals, propelled past terror into panic. Is the sinner consoled or even redeemed by this onslaught of beauty, or simply distracted from the potential terrors of the afterlife? Did she do enough—will we have done enough?—to atone? 

Verdi respects us too much to speak for a God he wasn’t entirely sure even existed. He puts his faith in our collective capacity to figure it out for ourselves. The Requiem ends with the soprano and chorus crooning so softly that they might as well be whispering, “Libera me”: Deliver me. 

Into what, who can say?

Copyright 2022 René Spencer Saller

Verdi and Puccini (plus Respighi)

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Left to right: Giacomo Puccini and Giuseppe Verdi, Italian opera legends and supreme silver foxes 

Giuseppe Verdi was the most influential and successful Italian composer of the 19th century. He wrote more than 20 operas, roughly half of them masterpieces. Over a six-decade career, he kept refining his talent, exposing it to new ideas. He produced many of his greatest works when he was in his 70s, at a time when 60 was considered old.

Verdi read widely and deeply, always hunting for the next opera plot. He worked closely with his librettists to achieve minimal flab and maximal feeling. In the world according to Verdi, rage and terror rule, desire redeems and destroys, but the tenor loves bravely forever. (If that sentence doesn’t make sense, wait for the singing and you’ll understand.)

Giacomo Puccini was born 48 years after Verdi, but the two composers’ lives overlapped significantly. Puccini, the most successful opera composer of the 20th century, seemed destined to play the organ in his native Lucca. He was descended from a 200-year line of cathedral organists, and he showed early promise on the king of instruments. But in 1876, when he was seventeen, he walked 15 miles, from Lucca to Pisa, to attend a life-altering performance of Verdi’s Aida. Verdi’s darkly alluring spectacle made young Puccini forsake church music for the stage. In 1880, he enrolled at the Milan Conservatory, Verdi’s alma mater. Like Verdi, Puccini loved literature, particularly plays, a frequent source of his opera subjects.

Unlike the other two composers on this program, Ottorino Respighi is known for his orchestral works, not for his eight (rather underwhelming) operas. His bold sonic palette pays tribute to Rimsky-Korsakov, with whom he studied orchestration while playing professional viola in Russia. Aside from Puccini, Respighi was the leading Italian composer during his lifetime. He might not have mastered the dominant genre, opera, but he doled out plenty of drama in a purely symphonic language. There’s a reason that soundtrack composers have been ripping him off for the past century.

Overture to La Forza del destino

Beginning with three menacing unison brass blasts, the overture to Verdi’s La Forza del destino (The Power of Fate) compiles several of the four-act opera’s most potent earworms. Although La Forza was premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1862, Verdi revised it seven years later, giving it a somewhat less violent ending and a longer, more comprehensive overture. This version, all sensuous menace and massive hooks, is a staple of the symphonic repertory. Listen to how the fate motive—that brassy opening assault—clashes and colludes with the gentle rising melody linked to Leonora, the mandatory tragic soprano.

Prelude to Aida and “Celeste Aida”

Set in ancient Egypt, Verdi’s grand opera Aida (1871) involves a tragic love triangle, his favorite dynamic. Aida, an enslaved Ethiopian princess, and Amneris, the princess of Egypt, are both in love with Radames, an Egyptian officer. Radames loves Aida but doesn’t want to betray his country. No one can love openly; everyone suffers alone. At last, in the final scene of the fourth act, Aida and Radames get their lovers’ duet, but by that point they’re sealed in a shared tomb and running out of oxygen.

The prelude is all about establishing character. Gossamer string textures evoke the heroine, and a doomy falling motive represents the Egyptian priests. The tender “Celeste Aida,” from the first act, finds Radames dreaming of military victory and his secret love, the enslaved Aida—two irreconcilable desires. It’s one of Verdi’s most famous tenor arias, and notoriously tricky. The hardest thing about it is also the softest: its radiant close, which calls for a high B-flat to be sung very quietly and morendo (“dying”; that is, slowly fading away).

“Die quella pira,” from Il Trovatore

“Die quella pira” (“from this pyre”) is a short, thrilling aria for tenor—more specifically, a cabaletta, which was used to convey intense emotion. Here, Manrico, in the last scene of the third act of Il Trovatore (1853), vows to save Azucena, the old gypsy woman he thinks is his mother, from being burned alive. He swears that he’ll douse the flames with the blood of his enemies, even if it kills him too. Flamenco rhythms and a bell-bright final high C make “Die quella pira” the ultimate rage aria.

Triumphal March and Ballet music from Aida

Verdi’s most famous triumphal march closes Act II of Aida. The simple but powerful trumpet-voiced theme reflects Verdi’s antiquarian interests. After learning that simple valveless horns had recently been excavated in Egypt, the composer imagined the type of fanfares that these ancient instruments might sound at a victory ceremony. Soon after Aida‘s Cairo premiere, this ersatz bit of Egyptian antiquity was prominently quoted in the country’s brand new national anthem. The ballet sequence, also from the second act, is equally rich in Orientalist ear candy.

Preludio Sinfonico

Puccini wrote the Preludio Sinfonico in 1882, when he was still a student at the Milan Conservatory. Rhapsodic and vivid, his second major orchestral work mixes Impressionistic harmonies; soulful, cantabile melodies; and cutting-edge chromaticism.

“The Spectre” (“La Tregenda”) from Le Villi

“La Tregenda,” sometimes translated as “Witches’ Sabbath,” is one of two symphonic intermezzi from Puccini’s first opera, Le Villi (1883). This symphonic interlude, originally accompanied by narration, depicts the frenzied dance of witches as they work their black magic. As it picks up speed and intensity, the feverish music enacts the fate of the accursed, who is compelled by vengeful fairies to dance himself to death because he broke a good woman’s heart.

“Ch’ella mi creda” from La Fanciulla del West

Based on a play by David Belasco, The Girl of the Golden West, Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West (1910) is a supercharged Italian melodrama set in California during the Gold Rush. Whiskey drinkers, vigilantes, and outlaws abound. The heroine, Minnie, is resourceful and brave, a pistol-wielding proto-feminist. She has two rival suitors: the local sheriff, Jack Rance, and the man she secretly loves, the sexy bandit Ramerrez (who sometimes goes by Dick Johnson). Instead of succumbing to the usual fateful forces that slay Puccini sopranos, Minnie stands down a lynch mob and rescues her lover before literally riding into the sunset with him.

Right before that happens, the heroic antihero (originally played by superstar hearthrob Enrico Caruso) lets loose with the notoriously tricky tenor workout “Ch’ella mi creda” (“let her believe”). With a noose around his neck, Ramerrez asks his captors to let Minnie think he’s not dead but off somewhere atoning for his sinful past. His last words to her, before his surprise rescue, are “You’re the only flower of my life.” This nuanced aria hovers between sorrow and bliss.

“Nessun dorma” from Turandot

When Puccini died, in 1924, his magnificent final offering, Turandot, was still incomplete. Arturo Toscanini led the posthumous premiere, which concluded abruptly, with the conductor turning around and saying to the audience, “At this point the master laid down his pen.” But thanks to Puccini’s detailed sketches, Franco Alfano was able to finish the opera, in a convincing approximation of Puccini’s style. Set in ancient Peking, this savage and strange love story pits Princess Turandot against basically everyone, but particularly Calaf, who successfully answers her impossible riddles and, to her horror, wins her hand in marriage.

Before launching into “Nessun dorma,” probably the most famous tenor aria in operatic history, the hero has just heard his murderous darling declare that no one in the kingdom will sleep until she learns Calaf’s name, the answer to the riddle that will get her out of marrying him. If no one figures it out, everyone gets beheaded. Calaf, undeterred, muses over her threats, imagining how he’ll tell her his secret name while kissing her. In the electrifying final moments, he cries out, “At dawn, I will win!/I will win! I will win!” The tenor emits two gasp-worthy high notes, both sustained in performance, though not in the original score. Those last ringing syllables, a B and an A, have made and broken many a tenor’s career.

Luciano Pavarotti’s signature song, “Nessun dorma” is adored by sports fans, reality-television contestants, opera connoisseurs, and your grandmother. No one ever tires of it. It made headlines several months ago, after Pavarotti’s widow and daughters publicly demanded that Donald Trump stop using recordings of the legendary tenor’s performance of the aria during campaign events.

Respighi’s Roman Festival

Resphighi’s Feste Romane, from 1928, is the last installment of the composer’s “Roman” trilogy of symphonic poems. The first two works, Fontane de Roma (1916) and Pini de Roma (1925), pictorial tributes to the fountains and pines of Rome, respectively, were so wildly popular that Respighi could have retired and lived off the royalties. Instead, he taught composition, directed a music conservatory, and toured the world as a pianist and conductor in performances of his own works. After finishing Feste Romane, he decided to stick to smaller, more intimate forms. “It is impossible to achieve more,” he wrote, “and I do not think I shall write any more scores of this kind.”

In true program-music tradition, Respighi left a detailed written description for each of the four movements. These explanatory notes aren’t essential—you’re in for a voluptuous listen either way—but they’re fun:

  1. Circenses (The Circus Maximus). A threatening sky hangs over the Massimo Circus, but it is the people’s holiday: “Ave Nero!” The iron doors are unlocked; the strains of a religious song and the howling of wild beasts float on the air. The crowd rises in agitation: unperturbed, the song of the martyrs develops, conquers, and is lost in the tumult.
  2. Il Giubileo (The Jubilee). The pilgrims trail along the highway, praying. There finally appears from the summit of Monte Mario, to ardent eyes and gasping souls, the holy city: “Rome! Rome!” A hymn of praise bursts forth, the churches ring out their reply.

III. L’Ottobrata (The October Festival). The October festival in Roman Castelli covered with vines: hunting echoes, tinkling of bells, songs of love. Then in tender evening comes a romantic serenade.

  1. La Befana (The Epiphany). The night before Epiphany in the Piazza Navone: a characteristic rhythm of trumpets dominates the frantic clamor: above the swelling noise float, from time to time, rustic motives, saltarello cadenzas, the strains of a barrel-organ of a booth and the appeal of the proclaimer, the harsh song of the intoxicated and the lively stornello in which is expressed the popular feelings. “Lasstece pass! Semo Romani!” —“We are Romans! Let us pass!”

A slightly altered version of these program notes, minus all the hyperlinks, appeared in the printed program notes for a recent concert by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, which included all these pieces.

Copyright 2016 René Spencer Saller