Actually, Ken, Fauré was not so religious as all that; I quote from a
convenient website
(http://members.macconnect.com/users/j/jimbob/classical/Faure_Requiem.html):
>Fauré spent much of his life in the service of the church, but his
personal views on religion were unconventional at best, downright
cynical or agnostic at worst. These are his thoughts on spirituality in
the /Requiem/:"Everything I managed to entertain in the 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."<
Nox est perpetua una dormienda. And Verdi was an atheist, I believe.
Berlioz wasn't too croyant, either, so that more or less wraps up 19th C
requiems of genius...(Well, OK, Cherubini, Dvorak...)
mj
Ken Wolman wrote:
> Jill Jones wrote:
>
>> Thank you Stephen. I hope that, and am sure that, the things that need
>> to be said get said.
>>
>> I wish it had been like that yesterday. At least we had the Paradisum
>> section of Faure.
>>
>> Best,
>> Jill
>
>
> Comment deferred is not comment denied. It's just hard for me to say
> anything coherent and not a brain-dropping about something so lovely.
> Whatever. Is it okay to describe the tone as "plaintive"? Indeed, it
> reminds me of the Faure music: sadness, sweetness, and consolation hold
> each other in balance. This keeps coming back at me:
>
> "but of the things
> no-one can know
> can we sing?"
>
> I suppose the answer is yes, otherwise only the dead would have voices.
> I'm tempted to try to get into the issue of how deeply our (or any?)
> culture struggles with coming to terms with death. Not "understanding"
> it--just struggling to cope with the absolute Unknown. The New York
> Times today has a story on Stanley Kunitz, who is about to turn 100. He
> seems unafraid: "I don't want to think about anything, except to become
> language."
>
> Faure faced it in the way of religious consolation. How many others
> have composed music based on the Latin Requiem Mass? And there are
> poets: *Timor mortis conturbat me*--and it goes back how far before
> that? I don't know how effectively the written or simply spoken word
> actually gets us over timor mortis or a sense of loss, even Donne's
> defiant sonnet which has its eyes on the 2nd birth in which people may
> or may not believe. Maybe song is the only way to surmount fear or
> grief? Ben Jonson has those two wonderful brief elegies on his son and
> daughter that almost have the music built in, and I'd not be surprised
> to find that they've already been set as art songs or choral pieces.
> Though music itself is no guarantee; it too can present answers that
> seem all but intolerable. Arrigo Boito, the Italian poet/composer who
> created the libretto for Verdi's *Otello*, created a "Rule of Life" for
> Iago, a solo that parodies the Credo, expounding his belief in a "cruel
> God," concluding with "And after all this illusion...death. And then?
> And then? Death is nullity, and Heaven is an old lie." Verdi's 1874
> Requiem for Alessandro Manzoni, unlike Faure's, seems to have to fight
> its way to consolation and hope: the Dies Irae is a raging brass-driven
> vision of terror and Hell that modulates over its length into a
> desperate plea ("Libera me, Domine!").
>
> I've joked that I wanted the Faure Requiem at my funeral, not the
> Verdi. As it is I'll settle for a few Barbara Cook recordings.
>
> Ken
>
> --
> Kenneth Wolman
> Proposal Development Department
> Room SW334
> Sarnoff Corporation
> 609-734-2538
>
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