Posted March 6, 2025
Gabriel Fauré
(1845–1924)
Requiem, Op. 48
Fauré’s creation of his beloved Requiem spanned almost a quarter of a century. Beginning first with a sole movement, Libera me, that he wrote in 1877, it took him another decade to add five more movements, and then another five years to write the last movement. In that 1893 version, the work was scored for a small orchestra without woodwinds or a full violin section, and it received scant attention until around 1900 when a publisher friend persuaded Fauré to re-score his Requiem for full orchestra. This 1900 version of the Requiem (which we hear tonight) soon rocketed to international attention, and Fauré, who had been little known outside of France, found his first global fame. Perhaps the Requiem’s most beguiling trait is its disarming tenderness in tone, which Fauré acknowledged and explained in an interview in 1902: “… people have said [my Requiem] did not express the terror of death, someone called it a lullaby of death. But that is how I feel death: a happy deliverance, a yearning for the happiness of the beyond, rather than as a distressing transition.”
Here are some of the Requiem’s highlights:
Though beginning in darkness and shadows, Fauré’s music is not about gloom so much as bittersweetness. Listen for the Kyrie’s imaginative beginning, where the counterpoint between the violas and organ trade phrases with the choir, creating a beautiful rocking effect.
In its peaceful supplication, the Baritone solo in Offertorium is one of Fauré’s great melodies. Listen at the end for the richly harmonized, sweetly pining “Amen” sequence.
In the third movement, over undulating harp and violas, the sopranos float and are then echoed by the tenors and basses. Here, the male voices are accompanied by a countermelody in the violins which create the feeling of an updraft, spiriting aloft the voices’ prayer.
In the fourth movement, out of the stillness, the lone Soprano humbly beseeches the Divine with an ethereal, soaring beauty. An enchanting moment then arises when, after the Soprano’s first solo phrase, the harp plays in octaves, creating a sense of a great, mysterious expanse.
The violins play a rather carefree theme in the fifth movement, busy with gentle rhythms, above which the choir sings in simple, grand sweeps upwards and downwards. Everything changes when the choir sings “Lux aeterna …” Here, as if glimpsing the wonders of eternal bliss for the first time in the soul’s new journey, Fauré begins an exquisite cascade of chromatically changing harmonies.
In Libera me, Fauré deviated from the typical Requiem Mass by eliminating the harsh terrors of the Dies irae (Day of wrath) texts. Nonetheless, over a motoric pulse in the low strings and organ, the Baritone’s dramatic solo is one of the most trenchant moments in the work.
The organ, later joined by harp, provide quietly stirring sounds in the final movement, above which arc the sopranos. The music floats above the stratosphere and into the infinite beauty. This is Paradise, creating a weightless ending to Fauré’s masterful musical journey.
© Max Derrickson