MUSIC Two performances were given last week at Lucerne of
Verdi's Requiem, under Signor Toscanini's direction, and, although neither was relayed by the B.B.C., no doubt many people with good sets will have listened to the broadcast from Sottens, apart from those fortunates who were able to renew more directly their experience of the performance in London last year. It has long seemed to me that the accepted history of the composition of the Requiem needs modifica- tion. That history is, briefly, that the " Libera me," the final movement of the work, was composed by Verdi in 1869 as his contribution to a joint tribute to Rossini's memory from a number of Italian composers. That project fell through. Two years later Verdi, in answer to a suggestion that he should complete the Requiem himself, replied that his correspondent was a rash and foolish man ; for, as the reprises of the " Requiem eternam " and " Dies Irae " were already composed, it would not require much effort to fill in the rest (which seems a large understatement). However, continues Verdi, the temptation will pass, and there is little fear of his adding one more useless example of Requiem Masses. - The occasion of his changing his mind was the death of Manzoni in 1873, which affected Verdi deeply and resulted in the composition of the remaining movements. Now, it has usually been assumed, on the evidence of Verdi's own statement, that the reprises of the " Requiem eternam " and " Dies Irae," which occur in the final section of the work, were written exactly as they stand in 1869, and that Verdi worked backwards from them to the beginning of the Requiem. The reprise of the " Requiem eternam " is set for soprano solo with choral accompaniment, and provides the emotional climax of the work. Its theme is used to open the first movement of all, but here the melody is given to the orchestra while the chorus mutters the prayer for peace quietly in a monotone. It has always seemed to me contrary to the normal process of composition that Verdi should have written that version for solo and chorus first and then reduced it, omitting the lovely extension of the theme by the soprano solo, to its barest form. It is as though a composer should write the development of a symphony before considering the form to be taken by the themes in the exposition, and should then proceed to empty them of a great part of their emotional content. And that does not seem to me to make sense.
The reprise of the " Dies Irae " contains internal evidence that confirms one's doubts. The sequence of the " Dies Irae " is a long metrical poem, of which the first verse only concerns us. In the " Libera me " there occurs a reference, in prose, to this opening verse : " Dies irae, dies ills, calamitatis et miseriae." Now, the melody to which Verdi set the poem fits it like a glove, but it does not fit the prose sentence, and in order to get in the music that goes with the second line of the verse (" Solvet saeclum in favilla ") Verdi has to go on repeating the first four words of the sentence and then fit in the rest of it, as best he can, to the music of the final line. It is extremely difficult to believe that he would have written for the prose-sentence music that does not really fit it, but does fit the verse, at a time when he was certainly not contemplating the composition of the Requiem as a whole.
In explanation, I can only suggest that, when he did come to compose the Manzoni Requiem, Verdi found that the " reprises " which he thought would come in did not, in fact, prove adequate, and that he had to write something different, which he then substituted for the passages already written in the " Libera me," and that he developed the music of "Requiem eternam " in the normal way and fitted the music design for the metrical " Dies Irae " to the prose sentence as well as he could. The point is not very important. But, as Mr. Lubbock records, when the late Provost of Eton was asked what was the good of spending time on old manuscripts, James retorted : " Oh! what's the good of any- thing? " On which his biographer's comment is : " Only second-rate minds waste time in calculating whether this or that is worth knowing." But it has this value, that it does explain the difference in quality and style between these reprises, especially that of the " Requiem eternam," and the rest of the " Libera me," with its operatic recitative and its jerky and rather trivial fugue, whose subject is interrupted by an orchestral bang on the off-beat of its last bar as in the
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