Requiem: hundreds ways to sing it in the centuries

To my good friend sire Teufel:

Thy wit, good friend, I much admire
And fear it casts mine i' the mire;
Thy poesy is much admired
And mine, alas, should be retired!
Thy scholarship on this musicke
Doth make our wretched Parla sicke,
His sources, all too oft consulted
Have in his downfall now resulted!
He fev'rishly doth hunt and scour
By candlelight, hour upon hour,
To post his posts in post-post haste,
His plagiarism in bad taste -
Better to drink wine from my cup
Than say to all - The game is up.

(The above sonnet was dash-ed off on Sir Marke's shirtcuffs
before he retire-ed for the night).

Thanks chaps, that's started off my day with several guffaws!

Back on topic - don't forget the Pizzetti Requiem I mentioned on the Ildebrando Pizzetti thread. A beautiful work.

Mark

Wow! Just had a listen to the Faure Requiem this afternoon. What a fantastic work.

'It has been said that my Requiem does not express the fear of death, and somebody called it a lullaby of death. But that is how I see death, as a happy deliverance, an aspiration to happiness above rather than as a painful experience'. (Quoted in the sleeve notes as told by Faure to his friend Louis Agettant in 1902).

Hence the repetition of the word requiem in five of the seven movements, and only a very brief mention of 'Dies Irae' just 4 lines in the Libera Me movement - a temporary black cloud if you like.

I thought the work was near perfect. A very moving piece. In its gentle way it had more heart-breaking moments than watching England play! Some darker colours provided by the baritone soloist in movements 2 and 6, and an obvious peaceful, heavenly ending in the last movement 'In paradisum'. My only quibble is that I wanted more of the soprano soloist - only given the Pie Jesu 4th movement.

It is also apparent from the sleeve notes that Faure saw his Requiem as an antidote to the excesses of the Berlioz, for which he did express some distaste. It is also of course therefore entirely different from the big bold drama of the Verdi as well.

If that's Faure then I am now a convert! He is one of those composers in the past that I have listened to here and there. Thanks Parla. Now for the Guy Ropartz as well if it is along similar lines.

Mark

PS The version came from my local library - it's Marriner/St. Martin in the Fields with soloists Sylvia McNair and Thomas Allen on Philips. 1995.

PPS DST The Frank Martin not yet arrived - on its way from Austria via Amazon. Again, that sounds from your comments as if it is in a similar vein.

Mark, I was happy to see the Pizzetti up there (another work, and composer, for whom I've much time) and to be alerted to the Pizzetti thread - went to post something there, but was strangely stalled by the "inappropriate language" filter. I'm ashamed to say I don't know the Delius, and will seek it out.  Your PPS about the Fauré and Martin Requiems got me thinking, so I listened to them side by side.  I'd say Martin perhaps comes closest at the end of his Offertorium and the astonishing In paradisum.  Otherwise you can tell (inevitably) that he's working close to a century later - the writing is much sparer, more astringent and dissonant, and there is most certainly a Dies Irae, whose vocal lines are pretty angular (though not in any avant-garde fashion). This being Martin, however, there's great beauty in such economy. As, once again, M himself observes, the liturgical words are rarely repeated, which brings a sort of plainness, a quality of "statement," that appeals to me.  I hope I'll get to hear what you think when the recording comes in!

Thinking about other requiems, and sticking firmly to my own curious collection and what hasn't been mentioned yet ... two Germans from the late 1920s I like a lot.  Richard Wetz:  not a composer I'd know if CPO hadn't attended to him, but I'm very glad to know his Requiem, published I *think* in 1925/26. The melodies are long-limbed, quite chromatic but firmly tonal.  To place his sound a bit:  his symphonies get linked to Bruckner (a whole other story) and he wrote a book on Liszt, another figure important to him, but with the Requiem the closest analogy that hits me - far from a new one - is Franz Schmidt. The only recording I know is, predictably, on CPO.

The other is a slight stretch:  Pfitzner's "Das dunkle Reich" (The Dark Kingdom) from 1920 calls itself a "choral fantasy," but in a much-quoted letter Pfitzner also described it as "a sort of literary requiem" for his first wife.  Pfitzner looks to be an acquired taste, in this forum too - I simply have to admit that this is a bug by which I have long been well and truly bitten ... The work sets secular poetry, mostly by C.F. Meyer. It's resolutely bleak, with to my ears a conscious heavy-footedness (mostly in the brass writing) even in the penultimate section, a setting of a Meyer poem whose speaker prays for death by daylight rather than in darkness.  Brahms is in the background, Bruckner and Mahler in the grim choral "Schnitterlied."  There's beauty, and triumph too, though, even in the grittiness.  Hope this might sound inviting to non-Pfitznerians. Rolf Reuter has recorded the piece, again for CPO, but there's an older recording by Jochum.

Finally, it'd be criminal not to note the a cappella Requiem of Jón Leifs, not quite 5 min. long (!) and combining texts from Icelandic folk poetry (again, no Latin mass), written in memory of a daughter. Extraordinarily haunting, shaped around a desolate, sustained open fifth (Jón was apparently deeply engaged with Icelandic folk music, about which I know nothing).  The recording on BIS includes several other pieces by this composer, among them the massive and crazy orchestral/choral Hekla (a volcano in a bit over 10 minutes). I hope anyone who doesn't know these might want to give them a chance.