Requiem for Good Friday: Between Credo and declaration of a revolutionary apostate
Sunday, 14 March 2010
To this day, Hector Berlioz’s Grande Messe des morts causes major interpretation controversies, which prove that their subject is a masterpiece. Conducting its performance by Sinfonia Varsovia: maestro Charles Dutoit, with Paul Groves (tenor) as a solist.
Hector Berlioz, one of the most powerful personalities of the 19th-century musical stage, though second to Beethoven, habitually surprised his contemporaries, eliciting violent objections as often as awestricken acclaim tinged with doubt. One of the greatest shocks, yet a triumphant one, was the reverberation of Grande Messe des morts for a tenor, choir, and grand orchestra composed in 1837 written to the lucrative order of the Minister of the Interior of France, Adrien de Gasparin, who expected an occasional mourning piece to commemorate the victims of the July Revolution of 1830 on its seventh anniversary.
Grande Messe des morts is innovative for at least two reasons: its approach to the question of faith, and its treatment of the instrumentation. Experts in the doctrine of the Catholic Church will be primarily struck by the composer’s unorthodox approach to the liturgical text, freely divided and shifted, and moreover – the strongest “objection” – encrusted with fragments of the Credo, forbidden in funerary masses.
The distinguishing feature of the instrumentation is the monstrous development of the line-up, composed of over 200 instrumentalists, including four spatially displayed wind sections and a choir of approximately 800 people. It was only six years later that Schönberg’s Gurrelieder broke this “record”, though only by a hair’s breadth.
Monumentalism was not among the whims of the French composer. It was connected to the circumstances of performing “official” works which frequently – since the days of the French Revolution – were presented during the pompes funèbres taking place in the open air or in cathedral interiors. Another method used by Berlioz to shock was full deliberation, going against the current of the centuries-long tradition of musical rhetoric. If we remember the Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, the corresponding piece in the mourning mass designed by Berlioz has an immense surprise in store for us. Instead of the motifs of sighs and gestures of bewailing, we find an aggressive exchange of short motifs between winds and strings, against which the grand choir passionately chants shreds of the liturgical texts. It is as if the composer wanted to shout out that the revolutionaries who surrendered their lives to a proper cause do not need the “unmanly” wails over their fate. Yet other parts of the Requiem – such as the heavenly sweet Sanctus, and the Introitus, which serves as a clasp for the entire composition – seem to suggest a somewhat contrary attitude of the artist, remaining in line with tradition. Without Berlioz’s Requiem, it would be hard to imagine further development of the mourning mass, and not only in the 19th century. There would possibly be no Requiem by Verdi, nor by Dvořák, without the daring and freedom in the selection of the texts for the mass so ostentatiously presented by Berlioz. Nor would Brahms have decided to compose his A German Requiem (Ein Deutsches Requiem) built of texts in the German language. Finally, without Grande Messe des morts, there would be no Britten’s War Requiem and Penderecki’s Requiem Polskie – masterpieces in which the Latin liturgical text intertwines freely with the words in the national language.
Berlioz’s Requiem is a pioneering work also for another current in lay music: the 20th-century spatial music. If we have an opportunity to listen to the “quadraphonic” effects in Tuba mirum performed in a manner respecting the intentions of the French composer, i.e. with four wind ensembles situated at the corners of the hall, and the main orchestra in the centre, it is quite certain that the stars of Boulez, Xenakis and Stockhausen will lose out in magnitude in our eyes.
Marcin Gmys, Beethoven Magazine, No. 4
2nd April, The Teatr Wielki – National Opera