When Michael Haydn’s daughter Josepha died, he did not write a Requiem for her. In those days before unions, a death in the family meant life and work just kept going as usual. A year later, when Archbishop Sigismund died, that was the time for Haydn to write a Requiem.
In the opening Introitus and Kyrie I hear a foreshadowing of the Kyrie in Anton Bruckner’s great Mass in F minor, an ordinary mass in the liturgical sense only. The Dies irae of Haydn’s Requiem is very dramatic but not over the top.
A slightly more consoling tone takes over in the Offertorium. In the Hostias there is this feeling of coming to terms with what has happened. The Sanctus is almost heroic. The Benedictus starts out much more consolatory before coming back to the mood of the Sanctus.
Haydn doesn’t get enough credit for the structural cohesion of his masses. In each of his masses that I’ve studied, I find that the Agnus Dei is a logical continuation of what has gone on before, and a skillful summing up. Haydn’s Requiem leaves us sad but hopeful.
I really like the brass in this performance by the Finnish musicians. The cinematography of it shows a dramatic flair that classical music videos could use more of.
Haydn’s Requiem inspired the infamous Requiem in D minor, K. 626, by Wolfgang Amadeus, son of the great Leopold Mozart. This Requiem is perhaps the musical composition most barnacled with mythology, hype and hypocrisy.
Wolfgang did not complete his Requiem. Unlike the Mass in C minor, K. 427, Wolfie had a good reason not to complete the K. 626: he died. Franz-Xavier Süßmayr completed the K. 626.
The same people who tell us it’s wrong for musicologists to carefully review Bruckner’s emerging score for the finale of his Ninth Symphony and reconstruct what Bruckner himself would most likely have written have no problem whatsoever with Süßmayr’s completion of the K. 626.
I assure you that musicologists like Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs approached the task of reconstructing Bruckner’s Ninth with scholarly precision. His team’s final effort avoids posthumous free composition completely. I seriously doubt Süßmayr approached his completion of the K. 626 with the same methodology.
It is one of Bruckner’s actual eccentricities which enable musicologists to recover Bruckner’s incomplete work with much greater certainty than with most other composers.
But of course Bruckner’s detractors have invented plenty of eccentricities to pile on him. And it doesn’t help that biographers have not yet finished sorting out the Nazi mythology with played up Bruckner’s appreciation of Wagner’s music and downplayed his religious devotion.
Bruckner was no simpleton ennobled by the mere fact of his Aryan ancestry, as racists like Hans Pfitzner would like us to believe (in fairness, though, Pfitzner was not rabid enough for Hitler). And Bruckner’s Ninth was most certainly no Requiem for himself.
After World War II, Bruckner’s church music was a revelation. It spanned his whole musical career, from some forgettable masses in major keys to the grand Te Deum and Psalm 150.
Bruckner’s Catholic faith was very important to him. He came close to marrying Ida Buhz, who wanted him to convert to Lutheran. Like George W. Bush with Laura Welch, I would’ve said “Ah, close enough.” But not Bruckner; Buhz’s unwillingness to convert to Catholicism was a deal-breaker.
Bruckner’s younger contemporary and supposed rival, Johannes Brahms, also wrote a Requiem, but in German, not Latin, Ein deustches Requiem, in memory of his mother. I used to have a recording of it sung in English. At times it strikes me as Brucknerian.
One aspect in which Bruckner was completely normal was in his automatic and unthinking admiration of Wolfgang Amadeus. Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony has a few subtle references to the K. 626, which Nikolaus Harnoncourt points out in rehearsals. Brahms did a heck of a lot more to get Bruckner’s music played than Wagner ever did (a very low bar, by the way).
Bruckner did write a Requiem in D minor. I have listened to it a couple of times. It has not made much of an impression on me, but I’m not going to write it off just yet as another one of his competent but undistinguished student efforts.
I did not know that Antonio Salieri wrote an actual Requiem, and, you know, not some mythological collaboration. YouTube brought it to my attention. First impression: if Beethoven had written a Requiem, it would sound more like this than like Michael Haydn’s.
Makes sense: when Beethoven wanted to solidify his knowledge of how to set Italian words to music, he sought out Salieri’s instruction. Surely Beethoven could carry Salieri’s lessons over to his setting of Latin words to music.
For his own funeral, Beethoven asked for Cherubini’s Requiem. His request was honored. I can only speculate as to what Beethoven would have thought of Verdi’s Requiem, premiered in 1874, which turns the Dies Irae into a sort of battle music.
Reminds me of Joseph Haydn’s Terremoto which closes out his Sieben letzten Worte unseres Erlösers am Kreuze.
I apologize if the aspect ratio’s a little off. This is the best performance I’ve found on YouTube.
Franz von Suppé, best known for operetta and “light classics,” also wrote a Requiem. This “remix” of the Dies Irae is dramatic or disrespectful, depending on your opinion.
I don’t think Charles Ives wrote a Requiem, but his setting of Psalm 90 might be appropriate for a memorial service.
By the way, I highly recommend SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart’s recording of Charles Ives’s Psalm settings.
Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings was originally an Adagio in one of his String Quartets. After it was played at President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s funeral, it became indelibly associated with grief.
I have Barber’s Adagio in my iTunes library played by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra conducted by Neeme Järvi. This video on YouTube, with Järvi’s successor, Leonard Slatkin, conducted, was for me interrupted first by an ad for The Masked Singer and later by an ad for Codecademy Pro. Better that than the dumb Cheetos commercials on Spotify.
Music open thread question: which music of mourning most closely expresses your feelings of grief right now?