Musicologist Oriol Pérez Treviño presents this year in Santa Cecilia of Montserrat three commented auditions of the best-known Requiems in musical romanticism: those of Hector Berlioz, Johannes Brahms and Giuseppe Verdi. Berlioz, the first one, started the activities of 2020, with great audience attendance in the church. Pérez qualifies it as a “revolutionary and romantic” requiem by an author who, throughout his career, tackled the composition of important religious works, among which his “Grande Messe des morts” (1837) stands as one of the most prominent. It was a big lesson to immerse ourselves, not only in the historical context, but also in the emotional power of this piece.
A revolutionary and romantic Requiem
Death stands as one of the greatest questions of human life. Someone has said that, indeed, it is the greatest, a true sublime mystery to which Art has not been indifferent. Moreover, there are even interpretations that affirm that the artistic manifestation must be understood as a challenge to the reality of death because the work wants to endure beyond the disappearance of its author. Novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) knew what he was talking about when, it seems, on his deathbed, he said: “I die, but this tart Emma (the protagonist of Madame Bovary) will always live...”.
The world of music, obviously, has not been indifferent and, thus, if there is a musical genre par excellence associated to death, it is the Requiem or mass of the dead. After the lecture, last season, dedicated to the excellent Requiem by W. A. Mozart (1756-1791), we thought it was a good time to program, this year 2020, three best-known Requiems of musical romanticism by Hector Berlioz, Johannes Brahms and Giuseppe Verdi.
Musical historiography has bequeathed us an image of the French composer Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) as a character far from the religious world and spirituality, obviating that romanticism, in large part, was a reaction against the objective and universal Reason characteristic of the Enlightenment on which the foundations of materialism and atheism were widely disseminated throughout the nineteenth century. It is no accident that as a revolutionary and romantic composer he was, Berlioz decided to face the composition, throughout his career, of important religious works, among which Grande Messe des morts (1837) stands as one of the most prominent.
Thirty-five years before the composition of this Requiem, François-René de Chateaubriand (1768-1848) published The Genius of Christianity (1802), which began shortly after his mother died. It was in the course of his writing that Chateuabriand embraced the Christian faith: “I became a Christian. I did not yield, I confess, to great supernatural lights; My conviction arose from my heart: I cried and believed. ” It seems that Berlioz read the work by Chateaubriand and he was very affected. In it he found an important source of inspiration for the search for new expressive paths and the aesthetic objective for a work like this Grande Messe des morts.