Requiem (Fauré)

Lore & Background

Fauré's reasons for composing the Requiem are often linked to the deaths of his parents in the mid-1880s, a common scholarly understanding. This version had five movements and did not include the Libera me. The final version, reworked for full orchestra, was premiered at the Trocadéro in Paris on 12 July 1900, during the Exposition Universelle. Fauré wrote of the work, 'Everything I managed to entertain by way of religious illusion I put into my Requiem, which moreover is dominated from beginning to end by a very human feeling of faith in eternal rest.' He told an interviewer, 'It has been said that my Requiem does not express the fear of death and someone has called it a lullaby of death. But it is thus that I see death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than as a painful experience.'

Reader's Guide

Gabriel Fauré's Requiem in D minor, Op. 48, stands as his best-known large work, distinguished by its focus on eternal rest and consolation rather than the fear of death. Its structure of seven movements, scored for soprano and baritone soloists, mixed choir, orchestra, and organ, departs from typical Requiem settings by omitting the full Dies irae sequence, replacing it with just the Pie Jesu, and including the In Paradisum text from the burial rite. Fauré's reasons for composing the work remain uncertain, though he stated it was not written for any specific occasion. Its duration is about 35 minutes.

Did You Know?

• The final version of the Requiem was premiered at the Trocadéro in Paris on 12 July 1900 during the Exposition Universelle.

From Chant to Concert Hall

For centuries, the words of the Mass for the Dead were sung in a single melodic line, unaccompanied and austere, as part of daily liturgical practice in the Catholic Church. The shift toward richer texture began in the later fifteenth century with Johannes Ockeghem, whose Requiem stands as the earliest surviving polyphonic setting of the form. By the early seventeenth century, composers increasingly turned to instrumental accompaniment and vocal soloists, moving away from the purely a cappella tradition. Today, more than two thousand Requiem compositions exist, spanning every era and national tradition from Victoria to Britten.

The Sacred Texts and Their Boundaries

The Requiem Mass draws its words from a specific set of liturgical sources, and understanding which texts belong to the Mass proper versus the surrounding burial rite is key to appreciating how composers shaped their settings. The Introit and Gradual both pull from 4 Esdras and the Psalms, while the Kyrie eleison is sung in Greek, each invocation traditionally repeated three times. Notably, the Requiem contains no Gloria, Alleluia, or Credo, distinguishing it sharply from the Ordinary of the Mass. The Libera Me and In Paradisum, though now standard in musical settings, actually belong to the burial rite that follows the Mass rather than the Mass itself; they were absorbed into the musical form only in the nineteenth century as composers grew more liberal with their source material. Most composers also omit the Gradual and Tract, and the Pie Jesu passage, drawn from the late lines of the Dies irae, has been set as a standalone movement by Fauré, Dvořák, Duruflé, and Rutter.

Fauré's Unconventional Omission

Fauré's Requiem, composed in the 1880s, occupies a distinctive position in the long tradition of Mass-for-the-Dead settings precisely because of what it leaves out. The Dies irae, that thundering sequence of judgment and wrath attributed to Thomas of Celano, had been a staple of French sacred music for centuries, often set as a standalone work by French composers well before Fauré's time. Yet Fauré made the bold choice to omit it entirely from his setting, stripping the Requiem of its most dramatic and fearsome element. In its place, the work leans heavily on serene, consoling texts, giving the composition a character of quiet peace rather than apocalyptic terror. This decision also elevated the Pie Jesu, a passage drawn from the closing lines of the Dies irae sequence, to a position of central emotional importance. Fauré's treatment of that text proved so powerful and evocative that it inspired a remarkable chain of independent settings: Dvořák in the 1890s, Duruflé in the 1940s, and Rutter in later decades each returned to those same words, creating their own standalone Pie Jesu movements. In this way, a single passage from Fauré's Requiem became a touchstone for generations of composers seeking a moment of intimate, personal grief within the larger liturgical framework.

The Tension Between Church and Concert Hall

A persistent tension runs through the entire history of Requiem composition: the pull between a work meant to be sung in a church during an actual funeral and one designed for the concert stage. From the eighteenth century onward, composers such as Gossec, Berlioz, Verdi, and Dvořák wrote settings whose sheer scale—enormous orchestral forces, extended durations, and operatic solo parts—made them impractical for ordinary liturgical use, effectively turning the Requiem into a dramatic concert oratorio. The Cecilian movement mounted a direct counter-reaction, advocating restrained instrumental accompaniment and discouraging the use of operatic vocal soloists in sacred music. Even within the more restrained tradition, composers exercised considerable freedom: most omit the Gradual and Tract, some divide long sections like the Dies irae into multiple movements as Mozart did, and others merge the adjacent Introit and Kyrie into a single movement. Musico-thematic relationships between movements add another layer of compositional craft, binding the individual sections into a cohesive whole rather than a simple sequence of liturgical responses.