Musical Moments #37
“Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.”
Leonard Bernstein
Requiem
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Movements 1-3
When Mozart started the Requiem, he was quite ill and completely aware of his mortality. Believing that he was writing for his own funeral, the task of this commission must have been unsettling.
Composing the opening of a large-scale work might be compared to writing the first sentence of a novel and an attempt to draw the audience in and provide a glimpse into what might be in store without revealing too much at the start. As usual, Mozart didn’t disappoint. He was predictably unpredictable with a solemn but understated opening few phrases while saving the ominous tone for the choir’s entrance. He succeeded in making the first two movements feverishly intense, and one can only imagine how careful he was in creating such an appropriate musical aurora and sense of expectation.
The steady pace at the beginning has always felt a bit like a deliberate and slow ascent to impending death with a gentle pause allowing us to catch our breath before charging into the aggressive “Kyrie” section. This section, which repeatedly states, “Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy,” provides Mozart with two opportunities. First, through the text, he was able to earnestly plea for mercy, while secondly showing off his compositional prowess through his mastery of fugal writing. Mozart’s writing tells us he is not going to the grave quietly. And although we played the short “Dies irae” section in an earlier “Musical Moment,” we have brought it back again to demonstrate the fearful but ferocious response Mozart must have felt while musically depicting the Day of Wrath.
His instrumental choices have always been intriguing as they clearly create this affect. For example, why use basset horns instead of clarinets? Mozart was one of a few composers who wrote for the basset horn, and then only rarely, but after all, he had just finished his divine Clarinet Concerto so he knew the instrument well. One could speculate that the basset horn was chosen because of the lower and more melancholic sound it produces. The same could be said for why J.S. Bach uses the viola da gamba in his passion settings. Both instruments have a mournfulness other instruments simply don’t possess.
In addition to the Bach Festival Choir and Orchestra, the brief solo is sung by soprano Sharla Nafziger.
Composer Aaron Copland, in his book What to Listen for in Music, discusses three levels of listening to music: sensuous, expressive, and sheerly musical. His hope in explaining these ways to hear music was to encourage the passive participant to be “a more conscious and aware listener—not someone who is just listening, but someone who is listening for something.” Mozart’s music is as relevant today as it was over two-hundred years ago, so allow me to challenge you to be in the moment with the music. The commonality of emotions Wolfgang Mozart was trying to express is here for you to experience today. All that is required of you is closing your eyes and breathing it in. Mozart will do the rest.
-John V. Sinclair
“When the real music comes to me—‘the music of the spheres, the music that surpasses understanding,’ That has nothing to do with me, ‘cause I’m just the channel. The only joy for me is for it to be given to me, and to transcribe it like a medium…..Those moments are what I live for.”
John Lennon
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