requiem – This Week's Music

Happy Easter all!

To finish our short series on music relating to the celebration of Easter, we will listen to Pie Jesu from the Requiem by the great French composer Gabriel Faure. It is performed by the singers of the ensemble Voces8.

Faure’s Requiem was written as a prayerful tribute to his father. It is somewhat strange that he would have written a Requiem, an inherently religious work, given that he was not religious and described himself as a “sceptic.” Yet Faure’s Requiem is unique among religious compositions in that it avoids the somber, often heavy nature of those works and instead creates a light, serene atmosphere.

The Pie Jesu is the most well-known portion of the Reqiuem. Most requiems are based on an opening movement titled dies irae, which introduces the thematic material for the entire work and presents the text of the Latin mass. Pie Jesu is simply the last verse of the dies irae.

Enjoy!

Hello all,

Our music for this week is Libera Me from Gabriel Faure’s Requiem.

Gabriel Faure was a popular French composer in the late 19th century who composed many small-scale works for solo piano and gained international renown as a piano pedagogue. His most famous pupil is a composer that we hear from quite regularly here at TWM: Maurice Ravel.

As a professor at the Paris Conservatory, Faure’s musical style was substantially influenced by the French music of his time. For instance, if you listen to the earlier portions of this Requiem, you will hear harmonic textures that sound like they could have been written by Debussy.

Unlike the other monumental choral works of his time, Faure’s Requiem is relatively soft-spoken. Where Brahms’ Requiem and Verdi’s Requiem raise the roof with their staggering volume, Faure’s Requiem is more likely to inspire reflection through its subtlety. He wrote of the work, “Everything . . . is dominated from beginning to end by a very human feeling of faith in eternal rest.”

The Libera Me is a perfect example of this meditative aspect of Faure’s music. It opens with a mournful solo that introduces the primary theme. The rhythmic foundation of the pizzicato strings provides momentum and tension. The choir then merges into a layered exploration of the thematic material provided by the opening solo, rising to a dramatic peak complete with winds and brass. The initial melody returns at the end of the piece, accompanied again by the pizzicato strings. However, this time it is sung by the whole choir rather than a solo voice, which creates a spine-tingling atmosphere of power and intensity. Then, just as soon as it appeared, the choir fades into the background and we are left with the same solo voice that we started with, a reminder of the introspective beauty of Faure’s “eternal rest.”

Enjoy!