Fauré Requiem Op. 48

The Trinity Choirs will perform the Gabriel Fauré Requiem, a choral setting of the Mass for the Dead, for the Feast of All Souls. There will be a free-will offering.

Among some half dozen great requiems from Mozart to Benjamin Britten, this by the Parisian composer and organist Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) is unusual for its distinctive tenderness, solace, and serenity, what he himself described as “a very human feeling of faith in eternal rest.” So doubtful about his own religious beliefs that his son called him “a sceptic,” he brought to the composition a most singular outlook: “My Requiem does not express the fear of death. Someone has even called it a lullaby of death. But it is thus that I see death: as a happy deliverance ... rather than as a painful experience. I have also instinctively sought to escape from what is thought right and proper, after all the years of accompanying burial services on the organ! I know it all by heart. I wanted to write something different.”⁠

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And so foregoing the large-scale solemnity of Verdi or Brahms, Fauré embraced a subtler melodic style and more modest musical forces. Instead of the liturgical tradition of an extensive 'Dies Irae' and 'Tuba Mirum' demanding the full powers of chorus and orchestra, Fauré included two new sections—the soprano’s lyrical 'Pie Jesu' and the otherworldly transcendence of 'In Paradisum'. These memorably gentle movements floating on treble voices underscore the entire work’s prevailing mood of sublime humility and peace, as John Bawden suggests, what has “often been described, quite justly, as a Requiem without the Last Judgment.” In Aaron Copland’s words, one “cannot help but admire the transparent texture, the clarity of thought, the well-shaped proportions. Together they constitute a kind of Fauré magic that is difficult to analyze but lovely to hear.”⁠

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