Mozart and religion and Verdi
Mozart had stopped being Christian, if he had ever been, long before he sat down to compose the Requiem. It is a fact that, from the moment he left Salzburg and Colloredo's employment, he never finished a religious work, not even the Great Mass in C K427 meant for his own wedding. This man of amazingly easy inspiration, who pulled the last three symphonies out of nowhere in six weeks, could not summon the inspiration for a work that certainly did not musically ask him more than one of his great operas. And when he set out to write the Requiem, which he had to complete as it was a commission - well, nobody blames him for dying, of course. But in the whole piece, there is a complete lack of contact between words and music. Think of the Requiem movement itself. Berlioz set the advance of fearful, unstoppable doom to music. Verdi put the horror and terror of death. Mozart wrote a battle scene. It is some of the greatest war music in existence; you hear the hammer of Thor striking his enemies across the sky. But there is no fear, and not even really inescapable doom. And take the Lacrimosa. Yes, everyone agrees, it is sublime music as if from a world beyond. But what on Earth does it have to do with the text? Compare, again, with Verdi. "On that tearful day of days, when ariseth from the flame Man the guilty to be judged - So, to him, forgive, O God." Verdi wrote a prayer, first in one voice, then in a chorus: a simple, passionate, final prayer for forgiveness. it is exactly what is in the text, nothing more, nothing less, nothing else. Mozart contemplated another life, but without any sense at all that there might be anything that needed praying for - or even, perhaps, a God to pray to. And then there is the Tuba Mirum. That is where Verdi shows that he understands exactly, from the depth of his soul, what is in the text, and Mozart does not even try. Verdi's sequence of Dies Irae, Mors Stupebit, and Tuba, proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that he was profoundly Christian. It gives shape, better than any other work of art I know, to an entirely Christian conception of the end of life. Death is terrible. Christians are not supposed to lessen its terrors or to act as though it did not hurt, because our Master hated and feared it. And nothing is more terrible, in all of music (except perhaps the no.33 in the St Matthew Passion, with Hell gaping open in our ears), than his Dies Irae. Or rather - nothing? Oh, no, there is one thing, Because in Christianity there is one terror greater than death, and that is judgment. And so, after the shivering in the shadows of the Mors Stupebit, comes the terror greater than Death: Judgment. The souls of the dead are called to appear before God the Judge. The rest of the enormous sequence is all about that - a terror greater than death. And the rest of the whole titanic sequence is about finding something to say to the Judge, ending in that pained prayer in the Lacrimosa.