Verdi’s Requiem
Royal Opera House
Carmen
Sadler’s Wells
Every time there’s a performance of Verdi’s Requiem the issue of whether it is a liturgical or theatrical work gets solemnly discussed, as if it couldn’t be both. If you take the Creator to be the figure described or invoked in the Bible, then He clearly has a taste for highly dramatic effects. As Auden put it, ‘When God said “Let there be Light” He must have realised that He was being extraordinarily pretentious,’ and the promise that the Day of Judgment will be heralded by trumpets indicates a thoroughly operatic imagination. It’s rather surprising that fewer composers haven’t risen to the occasion, and have tended to go in for the insipidities of consolation when they could have been trying their best, like Verdi and Berlioz, to emulate the terrors of Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgment’.
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