Fauré's Requiem

What are you going to listen to?

One of Europe's finest choirs with one of the most beautiful requiems ever composed - the Netherlands Radio Choir returns to The Hague for Gabriel Fauré's Requiem. This mass opens the heart, with waves of poignancy juxtaposed against gentle consolation. Not a farewell, but a tribute to life itself: a requiem for those who live and go on.

Mystical simplicity

But this concert begins with Miroir de Peine by Dutch composer Hendrik Andriessen, a subdued song cycle about Christ's Passion seen through the eyes of Mary. Mary's heart breaks during the Last of her son Jesus, whose agony she must watch helplessly. Thus Andriessen, who was no fan of ultra-emotional expressionism, arrived at a melancholy and subdued meditation on the Passion and a hymn to true maternal love. The song cycle Miroir de Peine, initially written for soprano and organ, was created in 1923 on texts by the poet Henri Ghéon. Andriessen deliberately chose an archaic song cycle in which mystical simplicity, universal love and religious devotion set the tone. Thus arose five intimate 'prayers' which - also in the arrangement for orchestra that Andriessen made of it ten years later - serenely but powerfully express the vain cry for help and the longing for intimacy.

A slender Greek virgin

The most substantial part of Beethoven's income came from composition commissions awarded to him by aristocratic admirers. Thus, in the summer of 1806, Beethoven went to the Hungarian palace of Count Franz Brunsvik, where he spent a delightful time in the presence of the count's three sisters. Even before the summer was over, Beethoven left for the summer residence of Prince Karl Lichnowsky in Silesia. Lichnowsky introduced Beethoven to a neighbor, Count Franz Oppersdorff, a wealthy aristocrat who attached such importance to music that he did not hire any staff member who did not play an instrument. A great admirer of Beethoven, he immediately had a performance of his Second Symphony arranged and on that occasion commissioned Beethoven to compose two new symphonies. Beethoven put aside his Symphony in c (the Fifth) and began work on a new one, which he completed at Lichnowsky's palace as late as the autumn of 1806. However, it was not Oppersdorff's orchestra that played the premiere of the Fourth Symphony. This Fourth was first played at a Viennese concert in March 1807, at the palace of Prince Lobkowitz, one of Beethoven's other patrons.

In Beethoven's oeuvre, the Fourth is, along with the Eighth, the least played symphony. Perhaps because, with its classical cut to Mozart and Haydn, it so contrasts with its surrounding symphonies, the powerful Eroica and the popular Fifth. "Just as No. 8 lives in the valley between the colossal No. 9 and the almost equally colossal No. 7, so No. 4 is equally overshadowed," noted encyclopedist Sir George Grove. Robert Schumann best characterized the Fourth: "A slender Greek maiden between two Norwegian giants."

A lullaby of death

It is not clear why Gabriel Fauré began a requiem in 1887. Was it because his father had died two years earlier or because his mother was dying? He himself would say, "I didn't compose it for anything, just for pleasure." He did want to write something different than usual, as he detested the dramatic and bombastic death masses of Berlioz and Verdi, for example. But above all, Fauré had a very different vision of death than could be heard in these requiems. "A happy release, a pursuit of happiness above rather than a painful experience," was how Fauré viewed dying. And he expressed this in the hopeful and subdued sounds of his Requiem: "My Requiem is gentle in temperament, like myself," he said of it. "It does not express the fear of death. Someone even called it a lullaby of death." Deliberately, Fauré chose not to include a "Dies irae" in his Requiem; a thundering section on Judgment Day did not fit with his vision of death. However, he did set the "Pie Jesu," with a moving soprano solo and with emphasis on the word "requiem," or "rest. It became one of the most beautiful and famous movements and, of course, sounded at Fauré's own funeral in 1924.