The order was almost equal to being dubbed officially

The order was almost equal to being dubbed officially a knight. Although everyone
in March of 1837 expected the outgoing French Minister of the Interior, Count de
Gasparin, to ask Luigi Cherubini to write a requiem in honor of the victims of the
July Revolution of 1830, the minister chose Hector Berlioz instead. However, an old
fox like Cherubini does not give up the field to a younger rival without a fight. By
way of his pupil, Halévy, Cherubini complained bitterly to de Gasparin’s successor
Bertin about Berlioz’ preferment – and was successful insofar as a certain »Mr. xx«,
as Berlioz always referred to the Director of the Department of Fine Arts, suddenly
began to put stumbling blocks in the way of the project. Not until de Gasparin, now
in retirement, laid down the law could the project get going once again.
However, the July deadline was now impossible to meet. Finally, an occasion to
perform the requiem emerged when General Damrémont died while trying to take
the Algerian town of Constantine and the work was rededicated to pertain to the
funeral ceremony for him and all who fell in that battle, to be held in the Dôme des
Invalides in Paris on December 5, 1837.
As we can read in a letter to his sister Adèle of April 17, 1837, Berlioz immersed
himself in this enormous task with fervor. »The text of the requiem was a quarry I
had long sought. It was finally given over to me and I pounced upon it in a kind of
frenzy. My head seemed almost ready to explode with the strain of my blazing
thoughts. Before even the structure of one bit was sketched out, I was already
jumping into another section. ... It was all I could do to control my material. In the
first few days, the poetry of this hymn for the dead intoxicated and enthused me so
much that nothing amicable offered itself to my thought, my head was boiling, I felt
dizzy ... Now order has come to the volcanic eruption, the lava flow has burrowed
its bed, and with God’s help all will turn out well. It is something magnificent! I will
no doubt be accused of being addicted to innovation because I would like to give
this domain of art an ingenuous expression, from which Mozart and Cherubini, it
seems to me, were often far removed. I am making terrifying associations which
fortunately have never been attempted, and of which I deem myself to have the
initial idea.«
And in fact Hector Berlioz’ great Mass of the Dead is a work of genius which far
exceeds all its predecessors in power and effect. Berlioz also gives the words a new,
dramatic turn. From the prayer of the congregation for the salvation of deceased
souls (»libera eas de ore leonis«/save them from the jaws of the lion) he makes a
plea of the individual who, shivering in terror and fear, finds himself on the Day of
Judgment exposed to the might of divine power and its inexorable verdict: »libera
me« – save me. Hence Berlioz’ Requiem is not a lament for the dead, not a
conventional memorial for the dead, but rather the cry of fear of the individual. The
motto here is no longer »requiem aeternam dona eis« (give them eternal peace),
but instead it is based on the cry of terror of the »dies irae«, which immediately
follows the plaintive »salva me« (save me).
A large number of other modifications Berlioz made in the text also illustrate the
dramatic structure of the Requiem. They clearly show that this artist, following his
general artistic-intellectual attitude, was less interested in giving the religious
content an accomplished form than in illustrating the dramatic contrast which is
capable of being read into the words. Choir and orchestra are taken to the limits of
their abilities. In contrast to all his predecessors, Berlioz does not »serve« the
liturgy, but instead makes use of it, makes it serviceable. In the process, he
produced certain intransigencies which are not so readily comprehensible. For
instance, the Sanctus, used by all before him to give musical expression to the joy
of the heavenly hosts, is set by Berlioz as a tenor solo – the only solo, incidentally,
in the entire work.
However, one of the most popular liturgical melodies of the Catholic church also
stands at the center of Berlioz’ Requiem: a sequence for the dead attributed to an
unknown thirteenthcentury Italian Franciscan Minorite, the Dies Irae, whose first
four tones – F-E-F-D – have again and again been put to use in the art music of the
nineteenth century and later, by Liszt, Rachmaninov and not least by Berlioz
himself, who also uses this series of tones in his confessional Symphonie
Fantastique.
Starting with Mozart’s Requiem, continuing by way of Cherubini and Berlioz, and
ending with Verdi, an increasing joy in the unchaining of dread can be observed in
musical adaptations of the liturgical text, a theater of horrors with bolts of lightning
and horrifying chasms, the evocation of fear and punishment, the gaping jaws of
hell. »It is as if in the nineteenth century, the epoch during which the horrors of
modern times began – the mass wars, the destitution wrought by industrialization,
the isolation of the individual – the vision of the end of days which so weighed upon
that Minorite monk of the thirteenth century was brought to life in music,« writes
Albrecht Dümling in his biography of Berlioz. And he goes on to say, »Berlioz’
Requiem is the drama of the end of time of the ›epic self‹, the nightmare of the Day
of Judgment. ›Requiem Fantastique‹ would have been a fitting designation for this
work considering the analogy to the self-referential structure of the Symphonie
Fantastique.« Quite close to this interpretation is that of Eduard Hanslick, the icon
of critics in that day, who wrote of Berlioz’ Requiem, »With a willful and worldly
confidence, Berlioz makes the venerable ecclesiastical text into a kind of fantastic
drama.«
And in this drama musical space plays a central role in the suggestive effect of its
»staging«. It offers us four groups of brass instruments, which try to outdo one
another with fanfarelike signals in the Tuba Mirum and come in one after the other
at ever shorter time intervals and in nested rhythms. Added to these is a large
number of timpani, drums and cymbals. The music breaks out of the fixed structure
of space – and at the same time sets off for the realm of noise, in order to depict
fittingly the chaos prevailing at the end of all time.
The effect of the first performance of the Requiem in the overflowing Dôme des
Invalides on December 5, 1837 was found by all present to be powerful. Ten days
after the event, Berlioz himself was still overwhelmed and wrote to a friend, »The
impression on temperaments of the most contrasting sensibilities and dispositions
was overwhelming. The chief priest of the Dôme des Invalides cried at the altar for
a quarter of an hour following the ceremony, he embraced me in the vestry in
tears; the shock produced by the eight pairs of timpani during the Tuba Mirum was
indescribable. One of the choir singers suffered a nervous breakdown. Truly, it was
of frightening greatness!«
Berlioz was well aware of the significance of his Grande Messe des Morts, as is
shown by a letter the composer wrote in 1867, that is, thirty years following its
composition, »If I were forced to burn all my life’s work with the exception of a
single score, I would plead for the Requiem to be spared.« Dieter Kölmel