Re-Requiem (I)

In 2023, Timișoara, one of Romania’s leading cities, was the European Capital of Culture. At the invitation of the local orchestra, the Banatul Philharmonic, I had the honor to be Conductor in Residence, and we built many projects together which are very special and close to my heart: Der Ring ohne Worte by Richard Wagner/Lorin Maazel, Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, culminating with Schönberg’s mammoth oratorio Gurre-Lieder (with 450 people on stage) and many, many more. Two of the projects were thought to resist the test of time and continue even after the European Capital of Culture ended: a community choir of approx. 300 enthusiastic amateurs (whom, at the dress rehearsal of Beethoven’s cosmogonic Ninth, I felt the urge to thank for reminding us, the professionals, why we are doing music) and a commission of a huge vocal-symphonic piece.

Timișoara is important in recent Romanian history because this is the place where, on the 16th of December 1989, the Romanian revolution started and soon ignited all the major cities in what was the bloodiest and most horrific change from communist dictatorship towards democracy. The next day, on December 17th, 101 people were killed in Timișoara, approximately 40 being shot on the steps of the Orthodox Cathedral. Overall, in Romania, between 16–24 December 1989, there were more than 1,000 people killed and thousands injured; nobody knows the exact number even almost four decades after the revolution…

Bearing in mind that the Revolution was this important for the history of the city, we couldn’t celebrate the European Capital of Culture in Timișoara without commemorating the victims of communism—we had to commission a special piece.

Soon and quite naturally I had an epiphany: a Requiem Mass (Missa pro defunctis) consists of seven main sections and seven countries from the Eastern Bloc had revolutions which changed their destinies in 1989: Poland, Czechoslovakia (which due to the revolution split into Czechia and Slovakia), Eastern Germany (which as a result of the revolution united with West Germany), Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania. So it was quite natural to commission a composer from each country to write a section of the Requiem in which the main idea was to bring peoples together against dictatorship, especially during these divisive times. One has to have in mind the fact that we were planning these concepts at the end of 2021, before Russia invaded Ukraine and history started repeating itself, making the idea even more relevant. Zeitgeist?

The models I had for this Requiem were in themselves examples of threads upon threads and intertwining stories in very unexpected ways. One of these models was Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem Op. 66, one of the pieces which changed me as a musician and as a human being. When, at the age of 14, I witnessed a live performance in the Evangelical Cathedral of my hometown, Sibiu, I could barely speak for days. It felt like a mirror was held in front of our faces and I suddenly discovered the ugliness and absurdity of war. For me, the whole experience was so powerful that I almost broke into tears during In Paradisum. After this, I looked for the score obsessively (back then, it was quite impossible to find something like this in a small Romanian town), and at 18, when I finally succeeded in getting a copy, I was immediately immersed even deeper in this idea of music as a pacifist statement.

Unternehmen Mondscheinsonate / Operation Moonlight Sonata – this was the name of the biggest and most destructive Coventry Blitz, executed by Hitler's Luftwaffe on the night of the 14th of November 1940. And how terrible and cruel this tragic irony is, to give this horrible operation the name of a famous piece by one of the most pacifist composers in history, the one who considered Schiller’s verse ‘Alle Menschen werden Brüder’ (All people will become brothers) the quintessence of humanity in his Ninth Symphony. The results of the horrific 10-hour-long raid: 568 people were killed, thousands injured, 80% of the houses were damaged and approximately 4,300 completely destroyed, one third of the factories burned down, crippling an important pillar for Britain’s economy, including its defence industry.

But the most shocking was the bombing and destruction of the Coventry Cathedral, the 14th-century St. Michael’s Church. In the aftermath of the bombings, Provost Richard Howard wrote with a framing nail on the altar wall ‘Father Forgive’, what Jesus Christ said right after he was nailed on the cross. These words are the basis for the Litany of Reconciliation, a prayer based on the Seven Human Failings (hatred, covetousness, greed, envy, indifference, lust, pride), spoken every day at 12:00, even nowadays, in the ruins of the old cathedral and inside the new one, built between 1956 and 1962.

For the consecration of the new cathedral, Benjamin Britten was commissioned to compose a Requiem in memory of the victims of the war but also to emphasize the idea of reconciliation between the belligerents. Britten, a well-known pacifist, seized the moment and created one of the most powerful and brilliant pieces composed in the 20th century, steeped in symbolism, the strongest manifesto against war. First, he asked permission from the Archbishop of Canterbury to use, in addition to the Latin text of the Missa pro defunctis, the Catholic funeral mass, secular English texts. After he received approval, he chose the poetry of Wilfred Owen, a brilliant British poet who was killed in action exactly 7 days before WWI officially ended. Tragically, his parents received the official telegram notifying them of his death on November 11, right as the church bells in their town were ringing to celebrate the end of the war. I remember vividly how I was shaken when I first heard this verse: ‘In this war even God lost a limb’.

Britten created three distinct planes of existence, directly derived from the idea of the Holy Trinity: the liturgical (full orchestra, mixed choir, soprano, singing the text of the Missa pro defunctis), a very intimate and personal point of view of the battlefield (chamber orchestra, a tenor and a baritone, the poetry of Wilfred Owen) and the innocents (a boys’ choir placed in the organ loft, again the Latin text).

While the liturgical plane represents a conventional funeral service of overwhelming power, it is juxtaposed with the interventions of the chamber orchestra and the voices of the tenor and baritone—representing two enemy soldiers—in a perpetual conceptual confrontation about the ugliness and senselessness of war. Alongside military marches and the sounds of battle, the way Britten sonically envelops Owen's poetry amplifies the melancholy and psychological agony of the soldier's inner world. Added to all of this is the third dimension: the innocence of the victims of war, expressed through the ethereal and angelic sound of the children's choir, which, due to its physical placement, seems to pour down from the heavens upon the audience.

The ultimate genius of Britten’s symbolism occurs in the final movement, Libera me. After a terrifying climax where the chaos of war overwhelms the surroundings, the two enemy soldiers meet in a dark tunnel in the afterlife. They recognize each other, and the German soldier sings, ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend.’ As they sing ‘Let us sleep now,’ the barriers between the planes finally dissolve. For the first and only time in the entire piece, the three planes merge into a single, unified, transcendent discourse. The symbolism is clear, yet devastating: it is only in death that the grand theology of the church, the suffering of the individual soldier, and the purity of heaven are finally reconciled.

To underscore the idea of reconciliation, Britten composed the piece specifically for three singers who belonged to the three nations that clashed most fiercely in WWII: the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya (USSR), the baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (Germany), and his beloved life partner, the tenor Peter Pears (Great Britain). However, being in the midst of the Cold War, the Soviet authorities refused for political reasons to grant Galina Vishnevskaya (the wife of the legendary cellist Mstislav Rostropovich) a passport, preventing her from participating in the world premiere of the War Requiem on May 30, 1962—so the soprano Heather Harper had to learn the extraordinarily difficult score in just 10 days. But Galina Vishnevskaya, with a courage bordering on suicidal, protested by refusing to sing at the Bolshoi Theatre, sparking a simmering scandal within the Moscow cultural scene. Fearing the situation might escalate, the authorities issued her passport, allowing her to participate in the Decca studio recordings in London in January 1963 and to sing at the London premiere on January 9, 1963, at the Royal Albert Hall.

The second model for the Requiem commissioned for Timișoara started from a letter. Four days after Gioacchino Rossini's death, on November 17, 1868, Giuseppe Verdi wrote to his publisher, Tito Ricordi: ‘To honor the memory of Rossini I would wish the most distinguished

Italian composers (Mercadante at the head, if only for a few bars) to compose a Requiem Mass to be performed on the anniversary of his death. I would like not only the composers, but all the performing artists, in addition to lending their services, to also offer a contribution to pay the expenses. I would like no foreign hand, no hand alien to art, no matter how powerful, to lend us assistance. Otherwise, I would withdraw at once from the association. The Mass should be performed in San Petronio, in the city of Bologna, which was Rossini's true musical home. This Mass should not be an object of curiosity or of speculation; as soon as it has been performed, it should be sealed and placed in the archives of the Liceo Musicale of that city, from which it should never be taken. Exception could perhaps be made for His anniversaries, if posterity should decide to celebrate them. If I were in the good graces of the Holy Father, I would beg him to allow women to take part in the performance of this music, at least this once, but since I am not, it would be best to find a person more suitable than I to achieve this end. It would be best to set up a committee of intelligent men to take charge of the arrangements for this performance, and especially to choose the composers, assign the pieces, and watch over the general form of the work. This composition (however good the individual numbers may be) will necessarily lack musical unity; but if it is wanting in this respect, it will serve nonetheless to show how great in all of us is the veneration for that man whose loss the whole world mourns.’

This letter would be published 5 days later in the Gazzetta musicale di Milano, from where it would be picked up by the majority of the Italian press, creating a huge wave of support for this unique collective project. Even the newspapers of Germany, France, and Russia reported on Verdi’s proposal, a vision deeply rooted in the desire to gather Italy’s creative minds, symbolically reuniting the nation through a singular tribute to its greatest composer.

Almost immediately the Milan Conservatory established the committee composed of Lauro Rossi, Alberto Mazzucato, Stefano Ronchetti-Montevit and Giulio Ricordi (as secretary) and Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna together with Camillo Casarini, the mayor of the city sent Verdi letters of support. Angelo Mariani, the conductor of Teatro Comunale di Bologna was also on board.

Because San Petronio fell under the jurisdiction of the city council rather than the clergy, the committee bypassed the need for papal approval. This allowed them to permit women to sing, an exemption Pope Pius IX would likely have refused, considering that even Rossini had been unable to persuade him to revoke the ban just two years prior.

Following several committee meetings, Giulio Ricordi wrote to Verdi, expressing their difficulty in finding enough distinguished Italian composers and suggesting that Verdi write the Requiem alone. Verdi refused, and the committee ultimately decided to invite three composers: Saverio Mercadante, Carlo Coccia, and Giuseppe Verdi. Verdi replied: ‘I would want art to be represented as amply and broadly as possible. I would rather have three hundred than three composers. Of course there mustn't be mere notesmiths. I well understand that if the number [of composers] is greatly increased there will be high points and low points; but in my view that's not such a bad thing, because the musical Composition must be an historical monument rather than (if possible, in addition to) an artistic monument.’ 

After countless deliberations, the committee finally issued the official invitations to the composers four months after the project’s inception, on April 25, 1869. Due to failing health, 75-year-old Saverio Mercadante gracefully declined the invitation; he would pass away just over a year later, on December 17, 1870. On May 9, 1869, Giulio Ricordi published a report in the Gazzetta musicale di Milano outlining the selection criteria and naming the thirteen composers participating in this exceptional endeavor: 

1. Antonio Buzzolla (Requiem e Kyrie), Maestro di Cappella at Basilica di San Marco in Venice

2. Antonio Bazzini (Dies Irae), regarded as Paganini's heir in virtuosity, in 1869 moved back to his native Brescia following a brilliant career in Paris. He later taught composition at the Milan Conservatory, where one of his students was Giacomo Puccini

3. Carlo Pedrotti (Tuba mirum), the conductor of Teatro Regio Torino

4. Antonio Cagnoni  (Quid sum miser), Maestro di Cappella at Cattedrale di Sant’Ambrogio in Vigevano

5. Federico Ricci (Recordare Jesu Pie), moved in 1869 from Sankt Petersburg, where he was the director of the Imperial Opera House, to Paris

6. Alessandro Nini (Ingemisco), Maestro di Cappella at Santa Maria Maggiore in Brescia

7. Raimondo Boucheron (Confutatis maledictis), Maestro di Cappella at Duomo di Milano

8. Carlo Coccia (Lacrimosa e Amen), Maestro di Cappella at San Gaudenzio in Novarra, succeeding Saverio Mercadante. Being 87, he was the doyen of the group

9. Gaetano Gaspari (Offertorio), respected musicologist and theorist, librarian and archivist of Liceo Musicale di Bologna

10. Pietro Platania (Sanctus), director of the Real Conservatorio di Palermo. Later became Maestro di Cappella at Duomo di Milano and director of the Real Conservatorio di Musica di San Pietro a Majella Napoli

11. Errico Petrella, who withdrew and was replaced by Lauro Rossi (Agnus Dei). Rossi was the director of the Real Conservatorio di Musica di San Pietro a Majella Napoli

12. Teodulo Mabellini (Lux aeterna), Maestro di Cappella at Santa Maria del Fiore, the Cathedral of Florence

13. Giuseppe Verdi (Libera me), no presentation needed, I’m sure

On June 5th, Giulio Ricordi sent each of the composers a package containing an informational booklet describing the project and a set of guidelines established by the committee to ensure the final work possessed a sense of artistic cohesion: specific section and text assigned to each composer, instructions regarding key, tempo, and a seven-minute target duration, freedom to introduce concertati (solo singers) and they were provided with standardized music paper to ensure the final pieces could be bound together into one volume. All this, with the pressing submission deadline set for September 15, less than two months until the first anniversary of Rossini’s death.

Almost one month before the deadline, Verdi sent Ricordi his Libera me, stating that the piece would need a solo soprano like Teresa Stolz or Antonietta Fricci, with ‘beautiful low notes’.

And now the chaos starts, with an endless series of misguided steps! Not only that it took more than half a year from the appointment of the committee until the composers were chosen, but during all those months nobody had real talks with Luigi Scalaberni, the impresario of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna, who was the decision maker regarding singers, choir and orchestra. Giulio Ricordi tried to convince Verdi to bring forward the date of the premiere to October, because that was the only period when Antonietta Fricci was available; Verdi stood his ground–the premiere should take place exactly one year after Rossini’s death. At the beginning of August the conductor Angelo Mariani wrote Verdi a letter in which he was stating that the singers and choir of Teatro Comunale di Bologna weren’t up to the task for such a challenging piece and with so little rehearsal time because … they couldn’t read music!

Despite Verdi’s repeated warnings and Giulio Ricordi’s trip to Bologna in mid-September, the impresario Scalaberni, emphasizing how overwhelmed and overbooked the theater was, refused to provide the necessary singers, choir, and orchestra (even though his contractual grip was only on the singers). This forced the mayor to suggest postponing the premiere until the end of the season, in December. A fuming Verdi, who disagreed to any other date than November 13 1869, pressured the committee to issue a public statement denouncing both their failure to complete the project and the incompetence of the local Bolognese authorities, who continued to insist on the delay, resulting in a bitter blame-game played out in the media among all parties involved.

Verdi held conductor Angelo Mariani primarily responsible, labeling him a genuine saboteur and suspecting that his passivity was rooted in bitterness over not being invited to compose one of the movements. His suspicions were further solidified by the fact that Mariani was simultaneously scheduled to conduct a memorial concert in Rossini’s birthplace, Pesaro, on the very same date. Countless musicological studies have lately emerged, proving that Mariani remained faithful to Verdi’s project and he only agreed to the engagement in Pesaro after it became evident publicly that the premiere of the Messa per Rossini would not proceed as scheduled on the anniversary of Rossini’s passing.

For a while, the committee and Giulio Ricordi still tried to convince Giuseppe Verdi to allow Messa per Rossini to be performed in Firenze or Milano (upon the unveiling of the commemorative bust of Rossini at La Scala.). Verdi remained unshakeable in his position, convinced that performing the work after the originally intended date would be utterly pointless. Carlo Gatti had a theory that Verdi continued composing his own Messa da Requiem, being the main reason why he didn’t want his Libera me to be performed elsewhere. There is a very tense debate whether Gatti’s theory is based on real chronological proof or only cherry picking some misdated letters.

After the death of Alessandro Manzoni on May 22, 1873, Giuseppe Verdi set out to compose his Messa da Requiem, essentially repurposing most of the Libera me he had written years earlier for the ill-fated Messa per Rossini. Ironically, Ricordi proposed forming a committee to organize the premiere, but Verdi shut the idea down, famously remarking, 'committees never do anything’.

And what happened to Messa per Rossini? For over a century, nothing! At the end of the 1960’s, when David Rosen started to research how Verdi’s Messa da requiem was born, he found the scores in Archivio Storico Ricordi. From 1970 Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani from Parma and Casa Ricordi involved countless musicologists and musicians to reconstruct the piece. 

The world premiere finally took place at the Liederhalle in Stuttgart on September 11, 1988, performed by the Stuttgart Bachakademie conducted by Helmuth Rilling. This was followed by a performance at the Duomo di Parma on September 15—nearly 120 years after the piece was originally intended to be heard.

On the 26th of June 2026 we are closing one of the circles opened during the European Capital of Culture in Timișoara—we will perform the Romanian premiere of Messa per Rossini. The next blog post will dive into our Requiem In Memoriam (2023), underlining the connections with War Requiem and Messa per Rossini (and not only).