Mozart and Verdi in the Dies irae: two ways to look at man before the last fear
by Marialuisa Veneziano
Before you start music
Also this Sunday the road indicates our reader.
The proposal, in appearance, is simple: to put one next to the other two Dies irae, that of Requiem by Mozart and that of Mass by Requiem by Verdi.
Same words.
Same old threat.
The same terrible day in which, according to the text of the sequence, the world will tremble, the tombs will open, everything hidden will be brought to light and man will no longer pretend not to know.
Yet it is enough to listen a few seconds of each other to realize that we are not simply comparing two composers.
We're listening two eras that have learned to be afraid differently.
Mozart and Verdi spend a little more than eighty years.
In the history of the universe they are nothing.
In the history of man I am a abyss.
The orchestra has changed, the theatre has changed, the way of thinking the form has changed, even the relationship between individual and destiny has changed.
And so, when those two ancient words — Dies irae — come into Mozart's hands, become one thing.
When they arrive in Verdi’s hands, they become another.
But in the end, under the arches, the tympani, the brass, the choirs, under the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, under Vienna and Milan, there is always the same creature.
A man who knows he has to die.
And that, as much as I studied, believed, loved, fought, earned or lost, before that knowledge suddenly comes small.
Maybe that's where we have to start.
Not from judgment.
From man.
There is a day that no one would see
The text of the Dies irae belongs to the great tradition of the liturgy of the dead. He doesn't speak with caution.
She doesn't comfort right away.
Don't cares.
Announce.
A day of wrath will come.
The earth will tremble.
The trumpet will call the dead.
A book will be opened.
And in that book, we are told, everything will be contained.
Everything.
The words said.
Those retained.
The good accomplished when no one looked.
The hidden evil so well that, at some point, we almost ended up hiding it to ourselves.
Perhaps this is the most terrible aspect of Dies irae.
Not death.
The impossibility of hiding.
From live we spend an amazing amount of time building shelters.
A role.
A reputation.
A house.
A career.
Even a certain idea of ourselves.
Then comes this medieval text and, with very little delicacy, tells us that there is a point where all this will no longer serve.
Mozart put it in music in 1791.
Green in 1874.
And neither of you try to sweeten him.
Mozart
Death does not need to cry to be inevitable
Listen to the complete "Dies Irae" sequence of W.A. Mozart (click on the black arrow to open the listening)
When begins the Dies irae Mozart, we don't even have time to prepare ourselves.
The choir comes in.
The bows fall forward.
Trumpets and tympani imprison a terrible force on the page, but what strikes me most, whenever I listen, is not violence.
IS the order.
Everything is in place.
The voices.
Accents.
The rhythm.
The phrases.
Even the anguish seems to know perfectly the way it has to go.
And that's what makes Mozart so creepy.
The world can collapse.
Music is not.
There is no hysteria.
There is no creature that loses control.
There is something much scarier:
a law that continues to work.
Judgment comes from above
The Dies irae Mozartian is in a lesser king, that the composer had already covered, in other places of his own music, a particular shadow. But it is not enough to say "re minor" to explain what happens.
It is the way that that shade is moved to transform it into necessity.
Strings almost never breathe.
Their race creates an unbroken tension.
The choir does not enter as a set of individuals begging.
Come in a collective voice.
And this is where Mozart does something terrible.
It takes away, at least for a moment, the privilege of individuality.
In front of judgement we are no longer what we have managed to become in the world.
We're not our title.
We're not our job.
We're not the important person that someone greets with respect.
We are not even the special pain we believe no one else can understand.
We're human beings.
Everyone.
And the sentence, if it has to come, knows no exception.
🎧 Listen to this.
Try to follow the choir without separating the voices.
Don't look for soprani, contralti, tenori, basse.
Listen. a single human mass.
It is as if hundreds of people simultaneously pronounce a truth that none of them can avoid.
And here's the paradox:
the more voices become one voice, the more we feel the loneliness of man.
Because before death we can be millions.
But everyone dies from himself.
And Mozart?
Here begins a temptation to which we must resist.
We know Mozart is composing Requiem in the last year of his life.
We know he can't finish it.
We know she'll die at 35.
And then we'd like to put this knowledge in every line.
We would like to imagine the pale composer, aware of the end, almost intent on writing his funeral mass.
The legend is beautiful.
That's why we need to be wary of it.
We don't know how far Mozart thought about his death while writing the Dies irae.
Music does not allow us to turn every note into autobiographical confession.
But there is one thing that we cannot prevent our listening.
We know how that story ended.
And therefore, when today we hear that man put into music the end of the world, we can not forget that from there gradually Your world would really end.
It doesn't change what Mozart wrote.
We change.
The greatest pain is not always what screams
Mozart doesn't drag us through the bay.
Don't beg us to move.
And maybe that's why he moved us.
There is a form of pain that, after being crossed long enough, stops managing.
It's almost composed.
Whoever saw someone suffer really knows.
Sometimes there's a time when there's no bigger words.
The room is in order.
People talk subvocal.
Someone fix a glass on the bedside table.
Someone else watches the clock without knowing why.
And then something immense is happening.
Mozart seems terrible just like that.
He never loses his shape while talking about the end of every form.
Then Verdi
And here it's almost worth changing room.
Why the Dies irae by Verdi does not enter the same world.
Break it down.
In 1873 Alessandro Manzoni died.
Verdi admires it with a devotion that goes far beyond the relationship between two great men of culture. Manzoni recognizes a moral stature, a figure in which art and the very idea of responsibility seem to have met.
And for that dead man he decides to write a Mass from Requiem.
The first performance took place on 22 May 1874, on the first anniversary of Manzoni's death.
This detail should already tell us something.
Behind the Requiem by Verdi there is no abstraction.
There is an absence.
One person was there.
Then there is no more.
Everything else starts here.
Green
When man can no longer look at judgment from afar
Listen to the Dies Irae by G. Verdi (Click on the black arrow to make the listening appear)
The Dies irae Verdiano explodes.
There is no other verb.
The orchestra does not accompany terror.
It produces it.
The ropes fall.
The brass open a whirlwind.
The crab comes as something that is not limited to being heard: affects us physically.
The choir does not seem to announce the judgment.
He seems to have been surprised by the judgment.
And this is the decisive difference to me.
Mozart builds a law before man.
Green puts man in the law.
In Mozart we can still look.
In Verdi we are invested.
Verdi knows the theatre. But here the theatre doesn't lie.
It has been said endless times that the Requiem by Verdi is "theatral".
Like it's an accusation.
As if a man who had spent his life understanding fear, remorse, guilt, supplication, love and death on the scene should suddenly forget all this by entering the church.
Fortunately, he doesn't.
Bring with him what he knows about the human being.
And Verdi knows something that the theater taught him better than many treatises:
men do not face death as concepts.
They face it like bodies.
Treman.
They scream.
Hush.
Negano.
They pray when until the day before they knew not to pray.
They still ask five minutes to a life that had spent half the time complaining about owning.
Is this man Verdi brings in Dies irae.
Not a hero.
Not a saint of his own salvation.
A man.
That's it.
Terror returns
The great insight of Verdi is that the Dies irae It doesn't happen once.
Come back.
Like a threat we thought we had gone away.
It is one of the things I find most true of the whole score.
Because big fears rarely work straight.
They don't scare us once and then go politely.
They disappear.
They let us breathe.
They make us believe we learned to dominate them.
Then maybe while we're doing something normal, they're coming back.
A word.
Sound.
One night.
A smell.
And suddenly we're back there.
Verdi does exactly this with his musical material.
He gives us other words.
Other episodes.
Other pleas.
Then the Dies irae Come back.
And we recognize him.
Perhaps it's the recognition to make it even more terrible.
🎧 Listen to this.
After hearing the attack of the Dies irae Verdiano, stop.
Wait a few seconds.
Then let him go.
See what happens before the choir starts.
The body knows.
He has memory.
You already know what's coming.
This is one of the great differences between hearing and listening.
The ear hears the sound. Memory hears what sound brings with it.
Two Dies irae
And no winner
Putting Mozart and Verdi in comparison does not mean organizing a competition between masterpieces.
It would be a very small way to look at two big things.
The comparison serves to understand what each reveals of the other.
With Mozart, terror has a geometry.
Verdi has a body.
Mozart puts us in front of the inevitable.
Verdi puts us in front of the moment when we understand that the inevitable about us.
Mozart says:
The day will come.
Verdi seems to answer:
He's here.
And between those two phrases almost a century passes history of European consciousness.
Mozart orders the pain. Verdi lets him in.
In the Dies irae Mozartian form contains emotion.
In the green the emotion continues to press against the margins of the form, almost he wanted to break them.
Doesn't mean Mozart feels less.
And that doesn't mean Verdi is less controlled.
It means that their idea of expression is different.
Mozart still seems to belong to a universe in which man, while trembling, can contemplate an order that surpasses him.
Verdi belongs to a world in which man has become so central that he can no longer avoid asking himself:
«What about me?»
Not only:
What will happen?
But:
What will happen to me?
And here we are in Manzoni
Maybe it's not random that behind the Requiem Verdiano's got him.
Manzoni had spent entire pages telling big events through very small human beings.
War.
The famine.
The plague.
The violence of power.
They could crush everything.
And instead the writer continues to stop on a face.
On a mother.
About a scared girl.
On a man who hurt himself, and one night, he finds that he can't live in the evil he's done.
On another mother still carrying her dead child.
The great story goes on.
But Manzoni always compels us to remember who pays it.
Verdi does something like that.
It could be the Last Judgement.
And he certainly does.
But, under the straw of the world that collapses, what we really listen to is a human being who trembles.
Maybe this is the Requiem that Manzoni would recognize.
Not because Verdi translates his faith.
But because he shares piety for man.
A mother, a coffin, a universal judgment
There are times when philosophy uses words too great.
Death.
Eternity.
Destiny.
Hello.
And it risks forgetting that, in true life, these words almost always come in much smaller forms.
An empty chair.
A number we won't call anymore.
A jacket left in the closet.
A photograph that one day we looked distractively and that suddenly we can no longer look at without feeling anything tightening.
That's where Mozart and Verdi meet again.
Not in the strawberries.
In the loss.
For whatever we think of the afterlife, faith, judgment or eternity, there is an experience that precedes all doctrine:
someone was there.
And then there is no more.
The real difference maybe is here
Mozart looks at death as a threshold that still belongs to an order.
Verdi looks at her as a wound that crosses man.
The first makes us feel small in front of the universe.
The second makes us feel awfully lonely inside ourselves.
Yet neither of them stops at despair.
Because they both do something that, if we think about it, has almost impossible.
They take the fear of death and turn it into music.
They give her a beat.
A height.
A lifetime.
A form.
What in life comes as chaos, in art becomes listenable.
It's not solved.
But it can be shared.
And there are pains for which, sometimes, being shared is already a form of mercy.
The note remains
Perhaps we are not afraid of death only because we ignore what is next.
We are afraid because we know perfectly what is before.
A life.
People.
Turn around.
Case.
Mattins without importance that one day we will discover have been happiness.
A voice he called us from another room.
A hand laid on ours.
A habit that bothered us and that we would give anything to be able to endure once again.
And then maybe Dies irae does not speak only of the wrath of God.
He also speaks of the human scandal of having to leave what we learned to love.
Mozart looks at him with the severity of a law.
Greens with the despair of those who read it fall on their body.
We, two centuries later, are in the middle.
And let's listen.
Maybe with less certainty.
Maybe with more questions.
But with the same fragile stubbornness to desire that what we love does not end.
We do not fear death because we have loved life too little.
We fear it because, at least once, life seemed so beautiful that it would never end.
🔎 One thing to know
In the Requiem by Mozart the Dies irae is a short, violent and concentrated number: a lightning.
In the Requiem by Verdi the text of the Sequence opens instead in a vast dramatic architecture; the material of Dies irae returns several times, interrupting, threatening, remembering.
And it's almost a poetic statement.
Mozart announces.
Verdi remembers.
The first shows us the day of wrath.
The second prevents us from forgetting that day exists.
🎧 One last listening
Listen to Mozart once again.
Only the beginning.
Then Verdi.
Only the beginning.
Don't compare the volume.
Don't compare the speed.
Don't ask yourself which one of you is more thrilled.
Just ask yourself:
Where am I, while this music happens?
With Mozart maybe you'll feel in front of something.
With Verdi maybe you'll feel something falling on you.
And here are two Dies irae become something more than two pages of music history.
They become two mirrors.
And like all the real mirrors, they don't just show us what we have in front.
Need to show us who we are while we look.
Take him with you
When the last deal is over, try not to search for another music immediately.
Stay a few seconds in silence.
It's a small gesture.
Almost nothing.
But perhaps in that nothing we will understand what Mozart and Verdi did.
They talked about death.
And yet, while we listened to them, we were alive.
We were breathing.
We remembered someone.
We thought of something we loved.
Maybe we were scared.
And then the music performed its greatest paradox.
Speaking of the end,
He reminded us how much we're still here.
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