Requiem: Maurice Duruflé (1902-1986)

The Requiem Mass, or the Mass for the Dead (Missa pro Defunctis), of the Roman Catholic Church takes its name from the opening words – Requiem æternam dona eis Domine (Grant unto them eternal rest O Lord). The requiem is habitually celebrated collectively in memory of the faithful departed on All Souls’ Day (November 2^nd – one day after All Saints’ Day and two days after All Hallows’) and is classed as a votive mass – i.e. one which is not related to the office of the day.  When relating to an individual, according to church law, it may be sung on the day of burial, on the third, seventh and thirtieth days after death, and on all subsequent anniversaries of the death.

By the 14^th century, the nine-movement structure of the requiem had reached the following state.

On especially solemn occasions the Roman responsory Libera Me Domine, followed the communion, and the movement In Paradisum, an antiphon from the traditional Latin liturgy, was sung as the corpse was removed for burial. These are both sections from the Latin burial service.

The requiem existed in plainsong form for many centuries, but the earliest polyphonic settings date from the late fifteenth century. The will of the composer and Papal Chapel singer Guillame Dufay (c1400 – 1474) directs that “twelve or more capable men sing my requiem on the day following my funeral, in the Chapel of St Stephen in Cambrai, and for this I bequeath four pounds.” The composition does not survive. Ockeghem, a pupil of Dufay, wrote a polyphonic requiem in the 1480s which served as a model for early sixteenth century composers. Later Renaissance settings were subsequently made by numerous other composers such as Morales, Clemens non Papa, Lassus, Palestrina and Victoria. Some forty-one polyphonic settings of the requiem survive between Ockeghem’s and 1600. Some are published, whilst others exist in various European monastic libraries. 

After 1600 composers began to include instruments in their settings – starting with basic continuo.  Concertato principles (small groups of instruments) were employed and the number of voice parts frequently rose to six or eight. By the mid seventeenth century requiem settings often included melancholic instrumental passages in between choral sections. Requiem settings for specific occasions proliferated: Victoria’s second requiem, for example, composed in 1610 for the assassinated King Henry IV of France, was used for the funerals of all subsequent French kings until the end of the eighteenth century.  

Throughout the Baroque and Classical periods, composers began to extend both the scale and the impact of the requiem through basic compositional devices, designed to develop and prolong existing material, such as fugal passages, repetition of the text, sequential passages, extended instrumental passages, ornamentation and pedal points. As the emergence of opera as a genre began to take hold and influence other musical genres, and as the new rococo style became common, more dramatic text setting began to occur, as can be seen in the requiem settings of J.C. Bach, Michael Haydn, Leopold Mozart, Pergolesi and the Viennese masters Antonio Caldara and Johann Fux. Mozart’s requiem, unfinished at his death, is a significant addition to the genre, and is his most widely performed sacred work, despite its incompleteness. The elaborate requiem of Cherubini, written in 1817 for the commemoration of the execution of Louis XVI during the French Revolution, was conceived on a scale which anticipated the later nineteenth-century requiems of Berlioz and Verdi which were to follow. More modest nineteenth-century settings were also made by Liszt, Bruckner, Saint-Saëns and Fauré. Other notable twentieth-century contributors to the genre include Duruflé, Karg-Elert, Lutosławski and Ligeti. Of these, Duruflé’s is the only one to have sustained a place in popular mainstream repertoire, probably because it is similar to Fauré’s popular composition, but, with its inherent lyricism, is more tuneful, relying hugely as it does on the original plainsong melodies, and harmonically and rhythmically more exciting than its contemporaries. Other composers, notably Brahms with his German Requiem, and Britten with his War Requiem, have flirted with the genre, but have ended up writing works which are not liturgical, as both either exclude some of the original text, in Brahms’ case all of it, in preference to Lutheran biblical quotations from the psalms and gospels, or include other text, in Britten’s case secular text from the war poet Wilfred Owen. Penderecki’s requiem of 1970, dedicated to the trade union leader Lech Wałȩsa, and written for the unveiling of a statue at the Gdaǹsk shipyards to commemorate those killed in the Polish anti-government riots, also contains secular text and a Polish hymn.

Programme notes by Peter Parfitt ©2013 Aberdeen Bach Choir