Hector Berlioz (1803 – 1869): Requiem (Grande Messe des Morts)
In the mid-1830s Hector Berlioz was short of funds. He had just got married to an Irish actress named Harriet Smithson, after years of doggedly passionate pursuit. Although Harriet had once taken the Parisian stage by storm with her Shakespeare interpretations, her career was now in sharp decline and she was heavily in debt. When she bore her new husband a son not long after, Berlioz realised that he could no longer pursue his old carefree existence. For the first time in his life, he would have to find a proper job.
Despite having recently won the prestigious Prix de Rome and composed two symphonic masterpieces, the Symphonie Fantastique and Harold En Italie, Berlioz was still making almost no money from his music. With mouths to feed, he turned on a whim to musical journalism and was surprised to discover a genuine aptitude for it. Naturally erudite and full of trenchant opinions, his lively copy was soon in high demand. By 1836 he was reporting to a friend that his articles for the Parisian Journal des Débats “seem to be making a stir. Parisian artists call them epoch-making.” Berlioz would keep his position at the Débats for the next thirty years, eventually becoming more famous among his contemporaries for his prose rather than his music.
There were however some serious drawbacks to setting a man like Hector Berlioz loose in the world of music criticism. The first was that he hated having to do it – hated having to analyze second-rate composers instead of being able to get on with his own creative work. He would often sit through mediocre performances in an increasingly cranky mood before venting his spleen in several paragraphs of scathingly witty vitriol.
And despite having landed a line of work sometimes requiring a measure of discretion, Berlioz was the first to admit that he completely lacked a filter:
I abominate criticism, and feel quite ill from the moment I see the advertisement of a new performance until I have written my article on it. The ever-recurring task poisons my life. I hate circumlocution, diplomacy, trimming, and all half-measures and concessions. They are so much gall and wormwood to me.
He also showed absolutely no favouritism towards potentially influential colleagues on the Parisian music scene. For so-called establishment figures he had a near automatic aversion. Over time, his entertaining but caustic diatribes would come to make him some powerful enemies, even as Berlioz remained entirely unrepentant towards anyone he might have offended. “People call me passionate, rude, spiteful, prejudiced”, he admitted in his Memoirs. “O scrubby louts! If you but knew all I want to write of you, you would find your present bed of nettles a couch of roses compared to the gridiron on which I long to toast you!”
On the other hand, if a piece of music genuinely moved him, Berlioz did not hold back in saying so, no matter who its composer was. “At least I can truly say that never have I grudged the fullest, most heartfelt praise to all that aims at the good and true and beautiful”, he wrote, “even when it emanates from my bitterest foes.” What Robert Schumann had once said of his music – “Berlioz does not try to be pleasing and elegant; what he hates, he grasps fiercely by the hair; what he loves, he almost crushes in his fervour” – was just as true of his journalism. Berlioz’s light always shone at its brightest when he was on the offensive in some way, or else had an axe to grind, musical or otherwise.
But just as Berlioz’s article-writing flourished, his real creative career – composition – continued to stutter. It wasn’t just a lack of time, it was also down to his inability to write easily sellable music. Berlioz wasn’t really the type to reach out to a wider amateur audience through charming song cycles, chamber music or sonatas for violin and piano. And as he could barely play a musical instrument himself (he is almost unique among major composers in not having learned the piano) he could not personally promote his music – unless of course he had a large orchestra to hand. In all, he had little interest in writing conventionally. His creative imagination dwelt amid gigantic schemes involving many hundreds of performers, which in practice could be much more difficult and expensive to put on.
So when an unexpected commission for a grand, ceremonial requiem mass arrived from the French government’s Ministry of the Interior in March 1837, Berlioz was only too eager to take it up. “I had so long ached to try my hand at a Requiem that I flung myself into it body and soul”, he recalled. “My head seemed bursting with the ferment of ideas, and I actually had to invent a sort of musical short-hand to get on fast enough.” Time was indeed a factor as Berlioz had only four months in which to write his 85-minute work (which he would title Grande Messe des Morts). He finished it in three and was just preparing for the first rehearsals when the Ministry blithely informed him that the planned performance – to commemorate the dead of the 1830 July Revolution – had been cancelled: not only had the government just emptied the treasury coffers on an expensive royal wedding, but they had also taken fright at the idea that memorializing the victims of a revolutionary coup might inspire citizens to revolt against their own regime. Berlioz was left floundering and out of pocket, not least when no payment appeared forthcoming for his efforts, nor for his own considerable expenditure on copyists and performers.
Increasingly desperate to retrieve the money owed to him, Berlioz was pondering his own civil revolt when he received another government call, this time from the Ministry of War. They promised to honour the original payment if they could use his Requiem for the state funeral of Charles-Marie Denys de Damrémont, a military governor of French-Algeria, who had just been killed in the Siege of Constantine. The Requiem’s new premiere was thus slated for the 5th of December, in the large-domed cathedral of St Louis des Invalides in Paris.
It was a most opportune reprieve, not least that the musical world would have been much the poorer if Berlioz’s Grande Messe des Morts had never seen light of day. It is an extraordinary work, and out of all the famous nineteenth century requiems, probably the most spectacular. Looking to fill out the vast spaces of the St Louis cathedral (with its imposing dome), it uses the largest forces imaginable for the time – Berlioz would originally specify that it needed 800 performers, while he also included four off-stage brass choirs for a particularly momentous passage in the score (more about that later).
Physical grandeur aside, the Requiem is also impressive for its wide range of moods. Despite passages of astonishing originality and power, it contains much in the way of mystical beauty and spiritual serenity. Berlioz always had a particular gift for conveying shifting emotions within his compositions. “The dominant qualities of my music,” he once wrote, “are passionate expression, inward ardour, rhythmical animation and the unexpected.”
One of the more absurd arguments ranged against Berlioz’s sacred music in his day was that as a professed agnostic, he could not have a proper appreciation of a liturgical ceremony. But few realised just how much he had been alive to the aesthetics of sacred worship since his childhood. At his first communion, he recalled music which “filled me with a kind of mystical, passionate unrest which I was powerless to hide from the rest of the congregation. I saw Heaven open—a Heaven of love and pure delight, purer and a thousand times lovelier than the one that had so often been described to me.”
As for the Catholic church, he once described it “of all religions the most charming, since it gave up burning people… [it] was for seven years the joy of my life, and although we have since fallen out, I still retain my tender memories of it.”
Set in ten movements, the first movement of Berlioz’s colossal Grande Messe des Morts – titled Requiem et Kyrie – sets the mood for much of what is to come. The broad, unison phrases which open the piece instantly create a mood of ceremony and also of physical spaciousness, as Berlioz shows no inclination to hurry between the various sections of the music. There is plenty of light and shade, including a yearning theme (“Te decet hymnus”) and a particularly dark and ominous setting of the words to the Kyrie Eleison towards its conclusion.
The next five movements comprise selections from the medieval Latin poem, Dies Irae (depicting the Day of Judgement and the Apocalypse) – a sequence that has inspired exciting music from a good many requiem composers over the centuries, with Berlioz being no exception. The first of these, Dies Irae – Tuba Mirum, pulls out every possible stop in its search for drama and tension.
The music begins quietly enough in A Minor with the tenors and basses intoning the original Gregorian chant melody of the Dies Irae. Gradually Berlioz adds more musical lines, increasing the momentum and building to a frightening intensity – not least in the way the movement lurches from A Minor up to B Flat Minor, then D Minor, and finally to E Flat Major, at which point the four brass choirs launch an unforgettable fanfare, signifying the wondrous sound of trumpets (“tuba mirum spargens sonum”) announcing the Day of Judgement. The music reaches its climactic apotheosis as the choir re-enters against a deafening orchestral tutti fully loaded with percussion, including a wall-shaking sixteen timpani, four tam-tams and two bass drums. Descriptive words can only go a certain way: this is music that really needs to be heard to be believed, and all the better if it is heard live.
If Berlioz’s approach had been full-on maximalist for the Dies Irae, the third movement Quid Sum Miser, a prayerful after-echo of the Dies, couldn’t be more different. Only a few orchestral instruments are utilized – a cor anglais, bassoon and lower strings, and the textures are sparse throughout, even if some of the themes from the preceding movement re-appear in much softer form.
The full orchestra returns in the next movement, Rex Tremendae, the first movement to be set in a major key (E). But the initial contemplation of God’s all-encompassing majesty soon gives way to something more uncertain and anxious, and there is further pleading for divine mercy. The emotional tone of this movement leads seamlessly into the subsequent Quarens Mae, which again serves as a gentle echo of what has just gone before.
For some, the mighty sixth movement, Lachrymose, is their favourite part of the whole Requiem. It is certainly the equal of the Dies Irae – Tuba Mirum in its emotional potency, as the mood returns to one of divine wrath and general foreboding. Berlioz makes full use of an undulating 9/8 time signature to create many cross-rhythms and curious metrical dislocations. The four brass choirs and full percussion re-appear to momentous effect towards the end, the latter suggesting the rumbling fires of hell.
The superb Domine Jesu Christe, immediately following the Lachrymose, is a reminder that not everything in the Requiem is about drama and power. Here the choir chant the text in fragments while confined solely to the notes A and B Flat. While they do this, Berlioz builds up a constantly changing mosaic of harmonic and contrapuntal patterns around them, showing off his great orchestral skill in the process. Only at the very end of the movement do the singers finally break their shackles and split antiphonally into a six-part D Major chord, before the movement ends softly in rich major harmonies.
In the eighth movement, Hostias (a prayer requesting safe passage for the dead), a simple chant in the male voices is punctuated by unusual chords created by high flutes and low trombones, as if emphasizing the gap between the celestial and the earthly. It is followed by a Sanctus, a hymn of joyful praise now occupying a very different spiritual plane to the Dies Irae movements: here, perhaps, is an evocation of the kind of music which so moved Berlioz at his first communion. He employs some of his most seductive scoring, with a long tenor solo (sometimes in dialogue with the female voices) accompanied by high string chords and a gentle tremolo in the violas. This solo section alternates with a fugal Handelian chorus on the words “Hosanna in Excelsis”, proof that Berlioz was well capable of writing softer, more socially reputable music when the mood took him.
In the Agnus Dei which closes the piece, Berlioz appropriately quotes music from the previous movements, not least the Hostias and the opening Kyrie. Although much of the second half of the Kyrie is repeated, this time it does not end in dramatic fashion but moves into a spirit of peaceful resignation, with soft Amens in the voices answered by gentle thuds in the timpani.
Although the Requiem premiere was well received by a Parisian press not always friendly towards Berlioz (“a masterwork worthy of comparison with the most famous inspirations of sacred music” enthused the journal Charivari) it nonetheless laboured under several disadvantages at its premiere. For one thing, Berlioz only had the means to hire around half the musicians he wanted for the occasion. Another was that the performance was accompanied throughout by funeral chanting from the priests of St Louis cathedral, not only distracting from the music but also drowning out many of its softer, more subtle passages. Although audience applause was forbidden, Berlioz still sensed the music had made an impression: “The vicar of the Invalides wept for a full fifteen minutes after the ceremony and then embraced me in the sacristy, tears still flowing down his cheeks”, he recalled gleefully. “One of the female choristers suffered an attack of nerves. It was awesome.”
It was only years later that Berlioz revealed (in his Memoirs) that the performance had almost been completely derailed by the less than reliable conducting of François Habeneck, whom the Ministry of War had rather foistered on Berlioz against his wishes. Perhaps inevitably, Berlioz and Habeneck hadn’t exactly been friends beforehand, and Berlioz sensed some skullduggery afoot to wreck the performance. It duly arrived during the climactic moment in the Dies Irae where the four brass choirs enter. Berlioz takes up the story:
To get the right effect in the Tuba mirum, the four brass bands were placed one at each corner of the enormous body of instrumentalists and choristers. As they join in, the tempo doubles, and it is, of course, of the utmost importance that the time should be absolutely clearly indicated. Otherwise, my Titanic cataclysm—prepared with so much thought and care by means of original and hitherto unknown combinations of instruments to represent the Last Judgment—becomes merely a hideous pandemonium.
Suspicious as usual, I took care to be close to Habeneck—in fact, back to back with him—keeping an eye on the group of kettledrums (which he could not see) as the critical moment drew near.
There are about a thousand bars in my Requiem; will it be believed that at this—the most important of all—Habeneck calmly laid down his baton and, with the utmost deliberation, took a pinch of snuff.
But my eye was upon him; turning on my heel, in a flash I stretched out my arm and marked the four mighty beats. The executants followed me, all went right, and my long-dreamed-of effect was a magnificent triumph.
“Dear me,” bleated Habeneck, “I was quite in a perspiration; without you we should have been done for.”
“Yes, we should,” I answered, eyeing him steadily.
Could it be that this man, in conjunction [with two others], planned this dastardly stroke?
I do not like to think so, yet I have not the slightest doubt. God forgive me if I wrong them!
Berlioz may have saved his own performance, but he still had to face dishonest incompetence of a different kind as he tried to collect his fee afterwards. A sum of 13,000 francs had been agreed, to be dispensed in two instalments – 10,000 to pay all his musicians, 3,000 for himself. Encountering French state bureaucracy at its very worst, Berlioz had to fight tooth and nail to receive both payments, only succeeding after an eight-month long battle culminating in the composer making the “most unpleasant, almost scandalous scenes.”
It was a sorry way to treat such a masterwork, even if such incidents would sadly prove quite common in Berlioz’s professional life. How much the acerbic composer would bring them on himself is open to debate.
What is certain is that the Requiem demonstrates Berlioz at his very best – indeed, it remains one of the most significant works of the first half of the nineteenth century. The composer himself seems to have recognized as much. “If I were threatened with the burning of all of my works except one,” Berlioz once said, “it is for the Requiem that I would ask for mercy.”
Suggestions for further listening
Although Berlioz composed around a dozen sacred works in all (including a recently unearthed Messe Solennelle from his youth), the closest sibling to the Requiem is a majestic Te Deum which he wrote in 1849, according to the composer himself, one of the “enormous compositions which some critics have called architectural or monumental music.” A feature of the work is the inclusion of a large concert organ, designed to be on equal terms with the orchestral forces (in a way anticipating the Saint-Saens Organ Symphony from forty years later).