The last concert of this artistic season conducted by Giancarlo Guerrero will be a meeting with one of the greatest choral masterpieces of the 19th century. It is true that the author of this work gained fame by writing operas rather than sacred music, yet Messa da Requiem by Giuseppe Verdi is a true gem of the requiem genre.
The German conductor Hans von Bülow described Giuseppe Verdi’s Messa da Requiem as “an opera in liturgical apparel”. Although this opinion was intended to depreciate Verdi’s work, it is actually an accurate (and not at all offensive) summary of the style of the work written by the Italian. Compositions ither than operas remain somewhat on the margins of Verdi’s oeuvre. No wonder then that the virtuosic, expressive vocal style characteristic of operas also penetrated into this funeral mass – informing the parts of four soloists and the choir. The monumental, one-and-a-half-hour composition consists of seven large sections, each divided into smaller episodes of contrasting moods and expressions.
Throughout his life, Verdi declared himself to be an agnostic, anti-clerical and a person staying away from the institutions of the church. The genesis of his Messa da Requiem was purely personal. Verdi decided to celebrate with it the memory of the writer Alessandro Mazzoni. The first performance conducted by Verdi took place in May 1874, on the first anniversary of the writer’s death, in the Church of San Marco in his hometown of Milan. A few days later, the mass also sounded at La Scala, and then in Paris, Vienna and London. In each of these cities, the Requiem aroused great public interest. No wonder, because it is a very effective and suggestive piece, written in a communicative style. Lyrical episodes are adjacent to fragments of great dramatic tension. This music expresses feelings of horror, rage, desperation, fear and doubt with great force and panache. The solution is to accept the fate leading to catharsis. Verdi’s work quickly gained great popularity and is now, together with Mozart’s Requiem, one of the most frequently performed funeral masses.