Sunday 5 April

Giuseppe Verdi
Requiem (1874)

1 Requiem and Kyrie
2 Dies irae
3 Domine Jesu
4 Sanctus
5 Agnus Dei
6 Lux aeterna
7 Libera me

Verdi did not feel the death of Alessandro Manzoni, the Italian novelist and poet, any less keenly because Manzoni was a very old man. It was a grievous blow. Verdi had long had a reverence, almost amounting to idolatry, for the eminent writer. He had admired him from a distance and, when a meeting was finally arranged, he was moved to the depths. ’How shall I describe the extraordinary, indefinable sensation I felt in the presence of your ‘saint’?’ he wrote to Countess Clarina Maffei. ‘I would have gone down on my knees if one could worship men.’

Earlier, Verdi had tried to explain what it was he felt about him. Manzoni, he said, had written ‘not only the greatest book of our time but one of the greatest books that the human mind has produced [I promessi sposi]. It’s not just a book, it’s a consolation to humanity. I was 16 when I first read it. Since then … if anything my experience of men has made me admire it all the more – because it’s a true book … Oh, if artists could but understand that ‘true’, there would be no more composers of the future or composers of the past, no puristic, realistic or idealistic painters, no poets Classic or Romantic, but true poets, true painters, true composers.’

This was Verdi’s creed as an artist, and the Requiem he wrote as a tribute to Manzoni and performed in 1874 on the first anniversary of the writer’s death is the fruit of it – whatever the critics’ subsequent attempts to reduce it to a category, labelled theatrical or operatic. The Requiem is true, before it is anything else. Verdi could only respond to the liturgy as the dramatist he was and by using the personal language he had evolved while composing a score of operas. But the sound-quality, texture and whole feel of the work is as unique and as different from La traviata or Don Carlos as they are from each other. And perhaps none of the works written before it had been so perfectly fashioned, so consistently strong in inspiration, so lofty in aim and achievement (even if the gaiety of the ‘Sanctus’ may at first disconcert the non-Italian). The Requiem used to be called ‘Verdi’s greatest opera’. Why not? As a sneer the remark is meaningless; as a splendid compliment it is not far short of the truth. What is the text of the ‘Dies Irae’ if not operatic?

Verdi’s Requiem is certainly not religious in an orthodox way. Neither is Brahms’ A German Requiem, nor Berlioz’s Grande Messe des Morts. Even in Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis God is, in a sense, the projection, the creation of human fears and longings. Like Berlioz, Verdi was a humanist who retained a poignant regret for his childhood beliefs. But he had little use for the historical church (listen to the Grand Inquisitor’s scene in Don Carlos or the gloomy, brutish music that accompanies the procession of condemned heretics in the same work); and the criticisms that emanated from the Catholic hierarchy when Manzoni died did not dispose Verdi any more gently towards it. ‘Not a Catholic in the political and strictly theological sense of the word – nothing could be further from the truth,’ was Boito’s verdict. As Verdi’s wife Giuseppina remarked, ‘the science, the sophisms, the metaphysical subtleties of the theologians and the learned of all the religions of all the ages strike vainly against the mystery of death.’ It is too big a subject to be left to the clergy.

Death and fear pervade the work. As someone who, in D’Annunzio’s phrase, ‘wept for all’, Verdi could express humanity’s feelings about it with ample authority. Hell, he knew, was something human beings can carry in themselves, and inflict on others. And death was in the air: Manzoni palpably a dying man some years before his long life ended in 1873; Rossini dead in 1868 (Verdi’s ‘Libera Me’ originated as a movement contributed to an abortive project for a mass in his honour); Verdi’s father dead, followed by his beloved father-in-law and benefactor Antonio Barezzi. The Requiem is, among other things, the passionate protest of a man who rebels against the outrage that is death. Boito experienced a similar feeling when he watched Verdi on his death-bed: ‘Never have I had such a feeling of hatred against death, of contempt for that mysterious, blind, stupid, triumphant and craven power … He too hated it, for he was the most powerful expression of life that it is possible to imagine.

_{Note by David Cairns}