The Verdi Requiem By Dave Kopplin

"In the theater, the public will stand for everything except boredom." (Giuseppe Verdi)

In the United States, we are despondent when an ex-president dies. Here in California, we mourn the revered film or TV actor. A poet's passing hardly makes the news; an opera composer probably wouldn't register on our cultural radar screen.

Not so in Italy, where poets and composers have had superstar status for centuries. Take the case of composer Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868), for example. The passing of Rossini so moved fellow countryman Giuseppe Verdi that he proposed to the city of Bologna, Rossini's birthplace, that a group of composers collectively create a memorial mass to be performed in his honor. The city agreed. Though Verdi completed his small portion, a "Rossini" Requiem never came to pass.

Fast forward five years. Italy was mourning the passing of Alessandro Manzoni: poet, author and Italian nationalist, a beloved hero of the people. Though Verdi did not know Manzoni well, he was a lifelong devotee of the author and his work. Verdi was deeply moved when he first met Manzoni in 1868, later writing: "I would have knelt before him if it were possible to adore mortal men."

Verdi didn't attend Manzoni's funeral, choosing instead to visit the author's gravesite in private. It was there, according to Verdi himself, that he decided he would write an entire mass in the author's honor. He proposed the idea to the city of Milan, Manzoni's hometown, and - perhaps with the unfinished Rossini mass experience still on his mind - agreed to pay for all the costs of creating a score and parts, and even hire the orchestra and soloists himself. The premiere of this "Manzoni" mass was scheduled on the first anniversary of the author's death.

This Requiem is unlike anything in the repertory. Other composers wrote requiem masses, but few, if any, of these works have the overall dramatic effect of Verdi's effort. And why would they? Verdi was a master of the musical drama. At the point in his career when he wrote the Requiem, he had already written dozens of operas including such classic works as Il Trovatore, La Traviata and Aida. Only Otello and Falstaff were yet to come.

Verdi was not a religious man. He was known to be a skeptic, famously taking his last wife, Giuseppina, to church on Sundays but not accompanying her past the front door. Some critics felt, in fact, that the overly theatrical music in his Requiem demonstrates his aversion to the church and its message. It was too over the top for the tradition-bound Catholic service, they said.

When the premiere took place on May 22, 1874, at Saint Mark's Cathedral in Milan, audiences didn't quite know how to react, either. Applause was out of place; a standing ovation was hardly appropriate. The next performances that followed in Milan's celebrated La Scala, where audiences cheered and demanded encores as if they were attending any other Verdi opera, presented the Requiem in its proper setting: in concert. (That said, anyone who happened to view the funeral of the Princess of Wales cannot deny the power of Verdi's music in a sacred setting. The soprano solo and choir excerpt, which falls about midway through the final "Libera me," is said to have been Diana's favorite music. Interestingly, it is derived from music originally written for the "Rossini" mass. Those who are curious can view and hear that section of Diana's funeral service on YouTube.) A "world" tour followed, including stops in Paris, London, Vienna, Berlin, and New York.

Verdi's Requiem is in seven large segments corresponding to sections of the Catholic liturgy. A number of things distinguish Verdi's work from other musical mass settings, including the prominence of the "Dies irae" (Days of Wrath), which most composers did not set. The pacing of Verdi's Requiem is another matter, too, with the composer guiding us through the liturgical drama with ease and facility, from the gentle and reverential music that begins the work, to the fury of the "Dies irae," not to mention the powerful "Tuba mirum" that blows the roof off (as all creation rises to answer the final judgment), the "Lacrymosa" that might just have easily been an Act I closer in a typical Verdi opera, or the peacefulness of the "Lux aeterna."

Indeed, Verdi could not help but compose like Verdi, with different sections of the Latin text being set like characters with their own themes and emotional underpinnings. The four vocal soloists are like actors in this unstaged drama, with carefully paced solos, duets, trios and quartets. Interspersed are stirring choral passages that range from a velvety first entrance that begins the work, to a full-voiced forte in the final "Libera me." Ancillary characters such as the fervent, pounding bass drum in the "Dies irae," the trumpets calling from offstage in the "Tuba mirum," and the plaintive bassoon in the "Quid sum miser" ("Oh what should I, so guilty, plead?") complete the cast.

Many critics of Verdi's work, Hans von Bülow among them, famously recanted their earlier objections to the Requiem. No matter for us, because audiences immediately embraced it as dramatic, powerful and as moving as any of Verdi's best-loved operas. It certainly deserves a place among his most important works.

Composer Dave Kopplin teaches in the music department at Cal Poly Pomona. He writes regularly for performing arts organizations across the country.