Requiem (Verdi)

Lore & Background

Verdi himself conducted, and the four soloists were Teresa Stolz (soprano), Maria Waldmann (mezzo-soprano), Giuseppe Fancelli (tenor) and Ormondo Maini (bass). The Requiem was repeated at La Scala three days later on 25 May with the same soloists and Verdi again conducting.

Reader's Guide

The Messa da Requiem is a central work in the choral repertoire, noted for its dramatic, operatic style. Musicologist David Rosen calls it 'probably the most frequently performed major choral work composed after Mozart's Requiem'. It later disappeared from the standard choral repertoire, but made a reappearance in the 1930s and is now regularly performed and a staple of many choral societies. Since the 1990s, commemorations in the US and Europe have included memorial performances of the Requiem in honor of the Terezín performances. The work has been staged in a variety of ways, including productions by Achim Freyer for the Deutsche Oper Berlin and by Clemens Bechtel for Oper Köln. In 2021, the New York Metropolitan Opera performed the Requiem for the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

Did You Know?

• Verdi composed the Libera me movement first, as his contribution to the Messa per Rossini.
• For a Paris performance, Verdi revised the 'Liber scriptus' to allow mezzo-soprano Maria Waldmann a further solo.

Origins in Grief and Rivalry

The Requiem's genesis is tangled in two acts of mourning. Their friendship fractured over this episode. He traveled to Paris in June and shaped the work into its present form, weaving in a revised version of the Libera me he had written for Rossini. The result was a deeply personal memorial that also carried the ghost of an earlier, abandoned tribute.

The Milan Premiere and Its Cast

Three days later, the same ensemble repeated the work at La Scala to immediate success. Yet reception was not uniform. Paris embraced it with seven performances at the Opéra-Comique, while London's new Royal Albert Hall could not fill its seats for what was perceived as a strictly Catholic occasion. Venice went to extraordinary lengths, commissioning Byzantine-style ecclesiastical decoration for its performance.

Voices from Theresienstadt

Perhaps the Requiem's most haunting chapter unfolded not on a concert stage but in a basement at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The performances became a lifeline of dignity amid unimaginable suffering. Decades later, the memory of those renditions has inspired commemorative performances across the United States and Europe. In 2006, conductor Murry Sidlin brought the Requiem back to Terezín as part of the Prague Spring Festival, rehearsing his choir in the very basement where the original inmates had prepared. Two children of survivors sang in that choir while their parents sat in the audience, a generational echo that transformed a memorial into a living act of remembrance. The work, composed as a private tribute to one writer, had become a vessel for collective mourning on a scale Verdi could never have imagined.

From Church to Concert Hall and Beyond

Although written for a Catholic funeral liturgy, the Requiem was deemed too operatic for regular church use and is almost always heard in concert form, a performance lasting roughly ninety minutes. After a period of absence from the standard choral repertoire, the work re-emerged in the 1930s and has since become a fixture of choral societies worldwide. Musicologist David Rosen has called it probably the most frequently performed major choral work written after Mozart's Requiem. Its interpretive life has expanded well beyond the concert podium. In 2006, Achim Freyer staged a production at the Deutsche Oper Berlin featuring choreographed allegorical figures alongside the four solo roles.