On Duruflé's Requiem, Howells's Requiem, Lobo's Requiem, and Esenvalds's In Paradisum

The music on this evening’s program explores the ideas of eternal light (lux aeterna) and eternal rest (requiem aeternam). All humankind, across the millennia, has experienced the inevitability of life and death and its natural corollary in the constancy of the rising and setting of the sun. Light and darkness guide the rhythms of life, and among people in the higher latitudes, the change from one to the other is felt acutely. The symbolic significance of that binary pervades sacred and secular myth, literature, poetry, and film, from prehistoric religion to Star Wars. In ancient Greece, Homer’s Odyssey imagined the abode of the gods: "it is not shaken by the winds nor drenched by rain; snow does not fall, but a bright and clear sky spreads above and a gleaming glow unfolds over it." Concepts of light and dark played a role in a variety of pre-Christian traditions that the early Christian church fathers absorbed into their own imagery and symbolism. The fourth-century Bishop Ambrose wrote in his treatise De Bono Mortis (“On the benefit of death”): "we shall go... where there are no clouds, no thunderbolts, no lightnings, no windstorms, nor darkness or evening, no summer or winter will change the weather, no cold, no hail, no rains... there will be no need of this sun or the moon and there will be no stars: just the glow of God will shine. For the Lord shall be everybody's light and the true glow, that enlightens every man, will shine for all." The Bible, in the book of John, records Jesus himself saying: "I am the light of the world: those who follow me are not in danger of walking in shadow, but shall be granted the light of life."

Similar notions of light and rest appear throughout the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass and Office of the Dead, from which all of the pieces on tonight’s program draw their texts. It begins “requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis” (“rest eternal grant to them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them”). The Communion portion of the Requiem reprises this same line, but first includes the antiphon “Lux aeterna luceat eis, Domine: Cum sanctis tuis in aeternum” (May light eternal shine upon them, O Lord, with your saints for eternity”). The poets of plainchant envisioned eternal rest in a paradise where light shines perpetually and bathes the company of saints in its ever-waxing warmth.

These powerful images have brought comfort, solace, and hope for centuries. Whether reeling from the sharp pain of loss, bending under the weight of grief, or simply trying to find peace and quiet in our busy, troubled times, the calm and ease they evoke helps us. Great writers and artists have given us descriptions and depictions to stimulate our imaginations and attempt to represent perpetual light and evoke eternal rest. Paradoxically, perhaps, music can create the strongest stimulation of all. Its medium, sound, is ephemeral, but its impact on the body and mind is powerful. I hope that these composers’ attempts to express ideas of eternal rest, perpetual light, and paradise create a space for reflection and repose.

The first half of the program combines several plainchants from the Gregorian Requiem and Office of the Dead with works by the late-Renaissance Portuguese master Duarte Lobo (1565-1646), the twentieth-century Englishman Herbert Howells (1892-1983), and the living Latvian composer Eriks Esenvalds (b. 1977). The plainchants present a beautiful marriage of word and melody. The introit, Requiem Aeternam, opens with a simple gesture, rising and falling one step. As it unfolds, its melody returns again and again to that point of rest. The excerpted movement from Duarte Lobo’s Requiem for Six Voices takes this plainchant as its inspiration. Lobo places the melody, in long tones, in the top voice of the chorus and layers rich polyphony below. The Lux Aeterna plainchant circles around itself again and again. The antiphon In Paradisum begins with a gentle four note ascent to its reciting tone, subtly suggesting a paradise above.

In their works on this evening’s program, Howells and Esenvalds might be deemed impressionists: the works don’t so much represent the eternal light of paradise directly as they recreate in sound the impression left by experiencing it. Like master artists, they play with opacity and transparency, light and dark, shade and hue, but voice and string are their watercolors and oils, and musical lines their brushstrokes. This physical space is their canvas, and our ears, not our eyes, behold the masterpiece. Howells wrote, “I have never been able to compose a note of music without either a place or a building in my mind.” In our case, the kaleidoscopic windows of King’s College Chapel in Cambridge inspired the chromatic harmonies of Howells’ Requiem. In a letter written in 1932, he notes a Requiem “done specially for King’s College Cambridge – otherwise I might not have dreamed of it.” If one enters the chapel and looks up, she beholds, eighty feet above her head, fan vaulting as beautifully intricate as a spider web, whose beauty masks its architectural purpose: to reduce the amount of vertical supports required within the chapel itself. In place of heavy interior support columns, more than two dozen immense stained glass windows rise on all sides to enclose the vast open space of the chapel and bathe it in colorful light. The fans’ many facets create visual splendor but also, importantly, reflect streams of music in an infinite number of directions. On a sunny afternoon, the listener there is immersed in sound as well as light. In the Requiem written for that space, Howells invokes the light (“lux perpetua”) with intense, sustained prismatic harmonies in a way that reminds me of the fascinating paradox of light: that white light is all colors at once. Howells once quipped, “the chord of the open 5th is like an open bottle: you never know what can be poured into it.” In these two Requiem Aeternam essays, Howells fills his “bottle” with drops of many colors, swirling together some wholly unclassifiable chords – a master of tincture, mixing elixirs of sound.

Eriks Esenvalds’ ability to craft evocative, atmospheric music has quickly earned him global renown. His In Paradisum, written in 2012, creates with sound his vision of the chorus of angels in paradise. From the outset, Esenvalds treats the choir not as a vehicle to deliver text (indeed, the choir starts with wordless humming and vowel sounds) but as a palette on which to mix an array of iridescent colors. Like clouds, the opalescent chords expand and contract, subtly changing shapes and shades. A solo cello and solo viola take on more individual, subjective roles, working their way through haunting melodies, broken up by ghostly harmonics and other special effects. Esenvalds’ music is almost synesthetic, so evocative that it conjures senses beyond sound. One might have a vision of heaven, or whatever his personal “paradise” might be. For me, I’m transported to a picture-perfect beach at sunset. The increasingly radiant, colorfully dissonant chords evoke the shifts in hue when the persimmon blaze of the setting sun dips into the horizon, its flame dappling the crests of the waves, its glow blushing the cheeks of the cloud-faces looking on. The fluttering harmonics of the cello and viola could be the ethereal wing beats of heaven’s archangels or the calls of gulls aloft.

The second half of the program features a Requiem by French composer and organist Maurice Duruflé (1902-1986). In 1947, with encouragement from Marcel Dupré and his publisher, Durand, Duruflé abandoned work on a suite of organ pieces based on plainsong themes from the Mass for the Dead and transformed their materials into a Requiem for chorus, orchestra, and organ. He later completed a version of the Requiem for organ and chorus and, finally, a version for chorus, organ, and chamber orchestra. This final version will be performed today.

Duruflé spent his childhood at the gothic cathedral of Rouen, where he routinely took part in elaborate liturgical ceremonies. Chant formed the foundation of his daily rehearsals and church services and undoubtedly made a strong impression on the young musician, for its melodic contours and modal harmonies shaped the music he composed throughout his career. He remained devoted to this ancient source material until the end of his life, writing in his later years about the importance of chant in liturgy and arguing that chant ought to serve as the basis for modern liturgical music.

His Requiem is an example par excellence of this compositional integration of the ancient and the new. Though the Requiem reflects the influences of Duruflé’s teachers Tournemire and Vierne, the classical French style of Fauré, and the Impressionism of Debussy and Ravel, above all it reflects the realm of the Church – its grand buildings and organs; the mystical, spiritual ambience of its liturgies; and, especially, the Gregorian chant traditions of its musical history. The Requiem Aeternam, Lux Aeterna, and In Paradisum chants heard on the first half of the program will reappear in complete form in Duruflé’s Requiem. These and other chant melodies of the Requiem mass form the musical basis for the entire piece.

Duruflé’s mastery is seen in the way he bends all of the musical parameters – texture, harmony, and rhythm – towards the essential qualities of the plainchant melody. Duruflé weaves the strands of chant into a richly textured tapestry by variously featuring the chorus, the organ, and the orchestral instruments in a way that maximizes the colorful capabilities of each without hindering the prominence of the chant themes themselves. The different parts of the ensemble trade melodic and accompaniment roles and seamlessly pass the chant tunes between them. The chant begins, in the very first movement, in the tenors and basses of the choir, but in the Kyrie, for instance, the trumpets present it. The entire piece ends with the In Paradisum chant soaring above choir and orchestra on the harmonic flute of the organ. Throughout, Duruflé embraces the fluid, shifting quality of the chants’ modal harmonies. At the opening of the Requiem, rather than “raise the curtain” like an opera overture with a clear pronouncement of a major or minor key, the Dorian mode seems to emerge like incense, as the many notes of the viola and cello lines slide past and over each other, curling around the smooth arcs of the tenor and bass melody. To remain true to the unmetered flow of the chant, Duruflé develops a pliable, almost arrhythmic flexibility. As he tells it:

I have done my best to reconcile, as far as possible, the Gregorian rhythms ... with the demands of modern meters. The strictness of the barline structure, with its strong beats and weak beats returning at regular intervals, is in effect difficult to reconcile with the variety and suppleness of the Greogian line where there is only a succession of impetus (rising) and falling. The strong beats had to lose their dominant character to take the same degree of intensity as the weak beats, in such a manner that the rhythmic Gregorian accent of the stressed Latin syllables could be placed freely on whichever beat of our modern meter.

The smoothly shifting atmospheres of each movement create beautiful realms for contemplation of these ancient melodies.

Duruflé chose not to include the Dies Irae sequence (a later addition to the Requiem), with its dramatic depiction of the “day of wrath,” that figures so prominently in the Requiems of Verdi, Berlioz, and others. The exception is the final stanza, the sweet Pie Jesu, which he sets for mezzo soprano and cello solo. But Duruflé does take the opportunity to highlight the more dramatic elements of the texts in the Offertory and the Libera Me, which reference the “day of wrath.” He explained:

This Requiem is not an ethereal work which sings detached from worldly anxiety. It reflects, in the unchangeable form of the Christian prayer, the anguish of man facing the mystery of his last ending. It is often dramatic, or filled with resignation, or hope, or terror, like the same words of the scripture used in the liturgy. It tries to translate the human feeling in front of their terrifying, inexplicable or consoling destiny.

In this way, Duruflé’s Requiem acknowledges the distance between the struggle of worldly existence and the restfulness of whatever we wish were here now and hope is beyond. In the Requiem’s final bars, Duruflé balances the choir’s descent with a radiant ascent in the strings, moving through exquisite harmonies to a cadence on a dominant seventh chord with an added ninth. Though elsewhere this final moment might sound unresolved, Duruflé paces the motion toward it in a way that tempers the sense of untethered mystery with a sense of grounded resolve. Duruflé calls his In paradisum “the ultimate response of faith to all the questions by the flight of the soul toward paradise.” Esenvalds, too, portrays this sense of rest being balanced by upward release. His In Paradisum ends with the choir on an unresolved sonority, suspended in time and place, with the solo viola and cello painting faint wisps of harmonics above.

Against the cacophony of contemporary life, where rings, dings, tweets, and beeps seem to soundtrack our every move, the notion of eternal rest sounds as pleasant as it does unlikely. Stillness becomes sacrosanct. Whatever your paradise might look or feel like, I hope that the experience of immersing in these sounds helps you imagine it more fully and find its light and its restfulness in the here and now. To be dwarfed by the rising ribs of this church structure and breathe the perfumed coolness of its air; to feel your bones rumble with the organ’s pulmonary might; to swim in the liquid sounds of human throats, that seem enriched by the minerals in the stones that reflect them: these experiences are at once earthen and ethereal. They ground us in ourselves and connect us to what is beyond and between us.