Halfway between sacred melodrama and sacred music proper, the Requiem Mass reflects the spirituality of a composer who, despite his staunchly anticlerical positions and his rational spirit, foreign to mysticism, never shied away from the need to confront the transcendent dimension of human nature. Throughout his operatic output, the dialectic between the sacred and the profane emerges, a man who asks the great questions of human existence, yet whose deepest convictions remain a mystery.

A sumptuous, monumental composition, the Requiem Mass was conceived during the growing success of Aida , when Verdi, by then an increasingly dominant figure in the music of unified Italy, was now lacking only the investiture of a great sacred work. The opportunity arose with the death of Alessandro Manzoni, a figure Verdi had always adored, an event that touched him so deeply that he immediately wrote to the publisher Ricordi: "I too would like to demonstrate how much affection and veneration I have felt and continue to feel for that great man who is no more and whom Milan has so worthily honored. I would like to set to music a Mass for the dead to be performed next year on the anniversary of his death. The Mass would be quite vast, and in addition to a large orchestra and a large choir, it would also require (I cannot specify now) four or five principal singers." And exactly one year after Manzoni's death, on May 22, 1874, the Requiem Mass was performed at the Church of San Marco in Milan, offered to the citizens in suffrage for the great poet and writer. From then on, Verdi definitively transitioned from a great musician to a monument to Italian culture. But the Mass is Manzoni-esque in its homage, not in its spirit: in its music, terrible and painful, there is not the optimism of Providence but the doubt of the fragile human being, the awareness of life's solitude, the uncertainty and dismay of the dying. Only in moments of heartbreaking tenderness does the music seem to allow a glimmer of light to shine through, and it is perhaps precisely in the strength of feeling that for Verdi we can find the faint signs of a comfort that life seems continually to deny.

Joseph Martini