The Berlioz Requiem - Pre-Concert Talk Transcript
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Berlioz Requiem - Pre-concert talk Transcript Date: Thursday, 12 July 2007 - 12:00AM Location: Barnard's Inn Hall THE BERLIOZ REQUIEM David Cairns I do not know whether any of you were at the recent performances of Benvenuto Cellini in the Barbican. I mention that because the contrast between Benvenuto and the Requiem could not be more extreme, and yet they were written within about six months of each other. This contrast illustrates in a particularly dramatic way the extraordinary variety which is one of the features of Berlioz's compositions. Each one inhabits its own separate, distinct poetic world. Each has its own special colour, dramatic atmosphere and form, peculiar to itself alone. So he can go in the most natural way, almost straight from his jubilant comic opera, which is all speed and light, mercurial changes of pace and rhythm with movement in triple or compound time, to the tragic, slow-moving, erratic, monumental Requiem. I thought I would just begin by illustrating this extraordinary difference between these two works. In the Cellini example, it is a part of the trio in the first act, where Benvenuto and his girlfriend, Teresa, are planning to elope the following night, during the carnival, under cover of darkness. Cellini's rival for the hand of Teresa, Fieramosca, is behind a sofa trying to hear what they are saying. This music is very quick, light fingered, very delicately scored and absolutely scintillating piece of music, and I would just like to offset the dignity and solemnity of the Requiem by playing you the first musical example. [Music plays] That excerpt from Cellini lasted about one minute twenty seconds, and it covered an enormous amount of ground. In contrast, the bit that I am about to play, which is the opening of the Requiem lasts the same time, and as you can see, the pace is utterly different. [Music plays] That was recorded in Westminster Cathedral - it is a work very much written for a resonant acoustic. This alternation of the richly coloured and passionate and the monumental and architectural is a pattern you find throughout Berlioz's career. We may think of him chiefly in terms of works like the Fantastic Symphony, the Damnation of Faust, the Roman Carnival Overture, or Les Nuits D'été, works which exemplify what he himself said about his music; that its predominant features were passionate expression, inward intensity, rhythmic impetus, and the unexpected, and that these were the qualities that were most personal to him and that make him the composer he is. But just as important, in his eyes, were what might be called his objective works, these huge public utterances, of which the Grande Messe des Morts and the equally monumental work, Te Deum, are the most obvious examples. Indeed, Berlioz himself said, towards the end of his life, that if he were threatened with the destruction of all his works save one, it would be the Grande Messe des Morts that he would save from the flames. Now, this may surprise us: surely one may think of the Troyens as his greatest work and the culmination of a lifelong ambition and a lifelong devotion to Virgil and Shakespeare - the Troyens should be the one, and if not that, then Faust or Romeo and Juliet, a work particularly dear to his heart. But I think we can understand why he singled out the Requiem, and it was not just because, unlike Faust and the Troyens or Benvenuto Cellini for that matter, it was associated not with failure and defeat, as they were, but with success on the grandest scale and also with a rare victory in the war against obstructive Parisian bureaucracy, as Berlioz recounts amusingly in his memoirs. Every time the Requiem was performed in his lifetime, it was a distinct success, but I think it went deeper than that. Though compromise was something utterly alien to his nature and he always strove to be faithful to his ideals and write his music and no one else's, he never gave up the dream of the composer as the mentor of the people, addressing them directly in great public ceremonies. It was a dream he had conceived as a boy, when his fertile imagination was seized by what he read of the ceremonies of the ancient world such as the huge musical rites in the Temple of Solomon. The dream was fed in his first years as a student in Paris, when he listened to his teacher, Lesueur, telling him about the great days of the Revolution, the consulate and the early empire, when music was performed by vast crowds of people in the Champs de Mars, and that these events symbolised the whole nation gathered together in a grand, collective act of praise and worship. Lesueur told him how the composers of the day, he himself among them, held rehearsals in the streets of Paris, standing on carts so that the people could see them, and taught the people the tunes of the great hymns they were to sing in the Champs de Mars a few days later. I think this is the idea that underlies the Grande Messe, that transfigured, because the community of the French nation becomes the community of all humankind down the ages, voicing its immemorial longings, its fears and frail hopes and confronting its mortality. Berlioz, in later life, spoke of himself as an atheist, at most an agnostic, a sceptic, and if he had a god, he said, it was Shakespeare - 'It is thou that art our father, our father which art in heaven, if there is a heaven.' Certainly he was no orthodox believer, but he had been a passionate believer in his childhood and adolescence. He is ironic about it when he talks about it in the memoirs: 'Needless to say, I was brought up in the Catholic and Apostolic Church of Rome, this charming religion, so attractive since it gave up burning people, was for seven whole years the joy of my life, and although we have long since fallen out, I have always kept tender memories of it.' He jests about it, but the loss of faith I am sure left a permanent mark on him. In the Childhood of Christ, we see him returning to it in his imagination, remembering what it was like, how he once believed with all his heart and soul, and in the Requiem, the very loss of belief is the driving force. The work conveys an intense regret, a vivid awareness of the need to believe, to be able to worship. Berlioz understands the religious impulse because he once had it and, in a sense, still has, imaginatively speaking. Through his own unsatisfied yearning he can catch the eternal note and echo it in his music. The Requiem, unorthodox though it is, has Wordsworth's visionary gleam, but it is an essentially tragic work. In the aftermath of the last judgment, human beings can only huddle together, broken, desolate. I would like to illustrate this by playing the last part of the Tuba Mirum, which after the tumult sinks down into a sort of murmur, and then the Quid Sum Miser, where you hear human beings sort of shivering together in a desolate empty universe. [Music plays] Now I will say something about the origins of the work. When Berlioz received the government commission in March 1837 to write a requiem commemorating the death of Marshall Mortier and the other victims of Fieschi's attempt to assassinate Louis- Philippe two years before, it came as the fulfillment of a long-nurtured ambition. The history of the Grande Messe des Morts goes back to the Messe Solennelle that he wrote for the Church of Saint-Roch thirteen years before, and as I will show you in a moment, there are direct musical links between the two works. Lesueur's accounts of the heady days of the Revolution and also what Berlioz read about its musical ceremonies fired a desire to revive and revitalise the tradition, with a large scale work of his own. By the time the commission came, his mind was full of how he should do it, and when the work was performed eventually, in December 1837 after many bureaucratic delays and attempts by ill-natured officials to prevent it happening at all, a journalist described it as having been knocking on all the tombs of the great for the past two years, but Berlioz's plan for the work certainly goes back further than that. Before he set to work to compose it, he wrote out his own version of the text of the liturgy. Berlioz treats the Requiem Mass as he does everything else he writes, as a dramatist. This kind of approach had got him into serious trouble ten years before when, as a student at the Paris Conservatoire, he was competing for the annual Prix de Rome, and presented with a rather stilted academic poem on the death of Orpheus, he fell foul of his examiners by reshaping it completely to make what he regarded as a suitable text for dramatic music. But now he was his own master and free to do what he liked, and he did. Berlioz's textual changes had the effect of bringing out the implicit three-fold division in the Requiem Mass, the successive Dantesque visions of hell, purgatory and paradise. In the words of the American musicologist, Edward Cohn, who has written a wonderful essay on this work: 'The remodeled text becomes a libretto of a special kind of music drama, a commemorative service of the dead, within whose ritual frame we are made to share the emotional experiences of a contemplative auditor attending the mass, one who, allowing his imagination full play, visualises himself as present at the wonderful and terrible scenes described, and who returns to reality at the conclusion of the service, with a consequent sense of catharsis.' To take one example, to create a sense of the return to the here and now, Berlioz repeats the Te decet hymnus from the opening movement, which doesn't actually belong in the Agnus Dei, and he repeats it in the final movement.