Verdi's Triumphant Requiem
Monday, May 5, 2008 - 8:00 p.m.
Roanoke Performing Arts Theatre
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Roanoke Symphony Orchestra
Roanoke Symphony Chorus
Jefferson Choral Society
Liberty University Concert Choir & Chamber Singers
Radford University Choral Union
Carter Scott, soprano
Eugenie Grunewald, mezzo-soprano
Drew Slatton, tenor
Robert Honeysucker, bass
DAVID WILEY Music Director & Conductor
John Hugo Chorus Master
VERDI - Requiem
Messa di Requiem
Giuseppe Verdi
(b. 1813, Le Roncole, Italy; d. 1901, Milan, Italy)
When the poet/novelist Alessandro Manzoni died in Milan on May 22, 1873 at the advanced age of 88, he left Giuseppe Verdi the sole surviving spiritual/cultural leader of the Risorgimento, Italy's successful mid-19th century movement of reunification as a nation, free of Austrian domination. Manzoni had been the poet of the Risorgimento, Verdi its composer.
To non-Italians, Verdi's artistic legacy in his mighty series of immensely popular operas is well known, Manzoni's far less so. Manzoni had written what is even today Italy's most famous and beloved novel -- its War and Peace or David Copperfield -- I promessi sposi ("The Betrothed"). Virtually every Italian has read it (Verdi himself first read it at age 16), not only for its romantic story but also for its fresh, vivid language. For Manzoni had consciously tried to create a new language for a new nation, heretofore divided by its regional dialects. In I promessi sposi he produced the model for modern literary Italian at just the moment when Italians were most eager to embrace it. The novel ensured Manzoni's place in the hearts of his countrymen, and at his death, a whole nation mourned.
Verdi mourned too. To his lifelong friend, the Contessa Maffei, he wrote: "Now all is over! and with him ends the most pure, the most holy, the greatest of our glories. I have read many papers. No one speaks fittingly of him. Many words, but none deeply felt."
Too grief-stricken to attend Manzoni's funeral, Verdi brooded on his own memorial -- something to counteract the "many words, but none deeply felt." A week later, he proposed it to the Mayor of Milan: a Requiem Mass to be composed by him and performed in a Milanese church on the first anniversary of Manzoni's death. Verdi would pay the expenses of producing and printing the music and would select, train, and lead the chorus, soloists, and orchestra. The city would pay the performance expenses. The Mayor didn't think twice. Here was Italy's greatest composer -- fresh from the triumph of Aida -- offering a new work in memory of Milan's first citizen. In the words of a later, fictional Italian, truly "an offer he can't refuse."
The Requiem and its performing forces -- four vocal soloists, including the celebrated soprano Teresa Stolz, the first La Scala Aida; a chorus of 120; and an orchestra of 100 -- were ready as promised on the anniversary, May 22, 1874. Verdi had chosen Milan's Church of San Marco as having the finest acoustics for the premiere. Under the composer's baton, it was one of those all too rare artistic occasions when expectations are exceedingly high and the work and the performance are great enough to meet them. Three days later, the Requiem was performed again, this time to the tumultuous applause the church premiere had denied, at Milan's La Scala opera house, site of many Verdi operatic triumphs. It then proceeded on a successful tour of European capitals -- Paris, Vienna, London.
But from the beginning, the "Manzoni Requiem" was a controversial work. Too theatrical, said some. Not a suitably reverent treatment of the sacred text of the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead. The famous German conductor and Brahms supporter, Hans von Bulow, initially dismissed it as Verdi's "latest opera in ecclesiastical dress" and refused to hear it. Brahms himself came to the defense; after studying the score, he declared, "Bulow has made a fool of himself, since this could only have been done by a genius."
Yet von Bulow wasn't entirely wrong. The Messa da Requiem, Verdi's only large-scale non-operatic work, really is a sacred opera. Its glory is its very theatricality. Verdi responded to the ancient text with, as Donald Francis Tovey said, "flaming sincerity," and the work is the product of his years of experience in the opera house. And the dominant role goes not to the chorus or orchestra but to his four soloists, all given music of great virtuosity and operatic thrust.
Yet the chorus and orchestra are not slighted. In his early years, Verdi was accused of writing for the orchestra as though it were a crude, small-town Italian band, such as those he knew in his hometown of Busseto. But when he created the Requiem, the composer was as great a master of the orchestra as of voices. Verdi wrote of needing always to find the right color or "tinto" for an operatic scene, and here he finds it every time, whether in the hair-raising brass fanfares that introduce the "Tuba mirum" or the three flutes spinning silvery webs above the soprano and mezzo in the "Agnus Dei."
Like two other composers of famous Requiems, Brahms and Berlioz, Verdi was an agnostic, and so, since he was too honest a man and artist, his Requiem does not portray what he could not himself believe. It is an often-troubling setting, providing no false consolation, no answers. The composer elevates the "Dies irae" ("Day of Judgment") portion of the mass to the center of his conception and gives it music of terrifying force. The emphasis throughout is on the fears of the living as they face the unknown region of death, not the joys awaiting the departed.
Abridged notes, taken from Janet E. Bedell.
© Janet E. Bedell 2007
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May |
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Sun 4, 2:00-4:00 p.m. |
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Roanoke Performing Arts Theatre
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