VOTD 5/3/2023

 Aribert Reimann: Requiem (EMI)

Purchased from Jerry's Records from the Duquesne University collection

Another day, another "classical" selection. Not that anyone's read my previous two postings as of this writing. I'll get onto something else tomorrow. I've promised myself that I'd spend no less time every day on something musical as I do listening to the albums and writing these missives. 

This is my third time listening to this piece, and it's one of the reasons I've been taking in requiems in general. I found this in the Duquesne $3 apiece boxes at Jerry's. I very well might have passed it over; the composer's name was unknown to me. I noticed he was a post-war German composer, and figured it was worth a $3 gamble. Like most of the Duquesne vinyl I've bought, I don't know that anyone every listened to it before me, it sees unplayed.

This work is pretty strong stuff. Yes it's highly modernist but I don't know that it crosses over into true serialism. I tried to secure a copy of the score through an interlibrary loan, to no avail. I like looking over scores but truth be told, I don't analyze them carefully. I like the riff in the opening, to use some decidedly non-classical terminology.

I attended a talk Dr. Paul Miller gave at Duquesne recently, about the Mozart Requiem. He made the point that the "Dies Irae" was intended to be a vision of hell. Maybe? Reimann at least has the tools and resources to come closer to that ideal. His "Dies Irae" is in indeed nightmarish, pounding and hellish at times. It's also the longest section of this work, and central to the work itself.

Googling Reimann's name, he came up as an accompanist often, to vocalists. He seems to have written quite a bit of vocal music: some lieder, and numerous operas, the most well known being Lear. (I have a copy of that work I've bought from Jerry's, too, pretty cheap.) He's also won a number of prestigious wards in Europe. Yet I knew nothing of him before buying this album. 

I'm reminded of the fact that I don't like the wide vibrato, broadly sung operatic style on modernist works in general. Actually, I don't like the style period, but on works such as this I particularly dislike it. The choral parts blend fine on the recording, as they should. It's when the solo vocalists step up that I don't care for the style so much. I can see the place for such a style of singing in Verdi or Wagner, but not so much for a work of this era (1982).

Why write a requiem? What does that even mean in the modern age? While not sounding 18th century (or even earlier), the form of this work is still derived from the liturgical requiem. Should we do away with old forms, as many of the post-war avant-garde believed? Or can we find new life in old structures?

Like Mozart, this is not intended to performed as a church mass. But why not? Most of Messiaen's music as some Catholic subtext. I've often said, if more church music sounded like Messiaen, maybe I'd go more often. But even then I'd be going for the music and not the church.

I suppose staging a work for chorus, moderate sized orchestra (with no violas) and vocal soloists might be nearly impossible in a church setting. This is music meant to be felt though. I don't care if it's alienating to many of the church-going audience. It would be amazing.