Messa da Requiem, Giuseppe Verdi

CCB, 30 de Março de 2007

Produção do Teatro Nacional de São Carlos
Co-apresentação: TNSC/CCB

Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901)
Messa da Requiem para solistas, coro e orquestra


Dimitra Theodossiou (Soprano)

Marina Domashenko (Contralto)

Fabio Sartori (Tenor)

Michele Pertusi (Baixo)

Direcção musical
Donato Renzetti

Orquestra Sinfónica Portuguesa

Coro do Teatro Nacional de São Carlos
Maestro titular Giovanni Andreoli


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For soloists (SMsTB); chorus (SSAATTBB); piccolo, flutes I-II, oboes I-II, clarinets I-II, bassoons I-IV; horns I-IV, trumpets I-IV, offstage trumpets I-IV, trombones I-III, tuba; timpani, bass drum; strings
Composed 1874 in Sant’Agata, in memory of Alessandro Manzoni
First performed 22 May 1874 at the Church of San Marco, Milan, Verdi conducting
Published by Ricordi (Milan, vocal score 1874, rev. 1875; full score 1913)
Duration: a little over 1 1/2 hours

Shortly after Rossini died in 1868 Verdi proposed that a Requiem Mass be prepared collaboratively by the best Italian composers and performed on the first anniversary of his death, the traditional occasion in Europe for unveiling monuments and literary tributes. The score was completed in due course but never performed. Verdi’s contribution had been the Libera me.

This movement and the thoughts that had yielded it were eventually gathered into Verdi’s Requiem Mass of 1873–74, a memorial to the great nationalist poet Alessandro Manzoni, author of I promessi sposi (“The Betrothed”), whom the composer venerated. Verdi had expected Aida of 1870–71 to be his farewell to composition, but a few weeks after Manzoni’s death on 22 May 1873, at the graveside, he resolved to return to work. “It is a heartfelt impulse, or rather a necessity,’’ he wrote, “to do all in my power to honor this great spirit whom I valued so highly as a writer and venerated as a man.’’ But the spirit of Rossini, too, is very much at issue here, and there is from time to time motivic homage to the Rossini Stabat mater.

The centerpiece of Verdi’s conception of the Requiem text is the massive second movement, which constitutes nearly half the work. This is a setting of the medieval sequence, or prosa, Dies irae, dies illa, a poem of 17 rhymed three-line strophes, a concluding quatrain (Lacrymosa), and a last unrhymed liturgical verse (Pie Jesu, Domine). Verdi envisages a frightening apocalypse, indeed, insisting on the Dies irae section three times here and once again at the close of the composition. With its bass-drum explosions and rapid passagework fleeing in all directions, the section should terrify you with its graphic suggestion (as my friend, David Cairns, put it) of the Devil chasing you to Hell. Nor are Gabriel’s trumpets in the Tuba mirum especially comforting. But Verdi offsets the horror with passages of tender supplication and now and then a glimmer of optimism as with the Offertorium, which begins as a consoling barcarole.

Each of the soloists makes a noble entry in the Kyrie eleison, after which they are parsed out in all their permutations, with such seeming inevitability that you scarcely notice the great care the composer has taken to assure each an equal share of the action. (Opera composers are quite skilled at this sort of thing.) The bass, like an angel of death, has the first solo of the Dies irae, albeit a brief one, at the words “ Mors stupebit.’’ Then comes the mezzo’s haunting aria on the proffering of the Book of the Dead (Liber scriptus), in which all things are written, nothing hidden. At the center of the movement the soprano joins the mezzo-soprano for the Recordare, with its striking cello-dominated climax; there follow the big solos for tenor (Ingemisco, a plea to be numbered not with the goats but among the lambs) and bass (Confutatis maledictis, begging to be spared from the acrid flame of Judgment Day). Meanwhile there are fine trio and quartet passages, and, in the profound tuttis of the Salve me and Lacrymosa, a scoring that allows the soprano’s several high Bs and Cs to float over the mass of performers with crystalline clarity.

Offertorium (no. 4) and Lux aeterna (no. 6) are for soloists alone. The soprano is absent from the Lux because the solo work in the last movement (Libera me, no. 7) is given to her alone. Here she represents harried humankind, troubled by hellish presentiments and seeking, tentatively at first, then with growing assurance, her place among the saved.

Note the many cross-references in both the musical and the liturgical texts. The verse structure of the Agnus Dei, for example, implies for Verdi three delicately varied strophes of his simple refrain; in the Offertorium, the recall of the line “Quam olim Abrahae promisisti” affords him a full-scale recapitulation of his menacing dead march. In the Libera me there is both a recapitulation of the bass-drum scattering from the second movement and an a cappella setting with the soprano solo of the Introit text with which the work opens.

The Requiem properly bows to ecclesiastical tradition: chanted declamation pervades the somber sections, and there are two full-blown fugues, in the Sanctus and the concluding Libera me. Yet essentially it is operatic, of course, the ancient and honorable liturgy serving as a profound libretto.

Verdi’s Requiem is in short a masterpiece of the genre, a work of “universal catastrophe, destruction, terror, and despair,” writes Andrew Porter, “then hope at its most urgent and poignant.”

—D. Kern Holoman
http://chorus.ucdavis.edu/verdi/index.htm