12 - A question of genre

Summary

In his book on the Missa solemnis William Drabkin, after noting the importance of musical qualities that can be understood independently of the text, rightly warns, ‘Of course, it would be a mistake to suppose that these musical features manifest themselves in the same way here as in, say, a sonata or symphony.’ That is also true of the Requiem, of course, but confusion over the work's genre has come from the other direction: that of regarding the work as an unstaged opera. For the Requiem lies somewhere between the poles of opera and symphony. At times the music traces its own expressive plot virtually unaided by the text; this is especially true where the text is brief and lacks sharp mood swings (e.g., ‘Kyrie’, ‘Quid sum miser’, and Agnus Dei). But at other times Verdi is acutely attentive to shifting images in the text, even to the point of depicting individual words: ‘Quantus tremor est futurus’, for example (see p. 26). And at times the individual singers assume the role of characters, almost as in opera, before retreating into anonymity.

Is the Requiem ‘good church music’?

Far more than any issue about the musical value of the work, the complex of issues around the work's genre (including its suitability as church music and the composer's ‘sincerity’) have dominated the reception of the Requiem from the very beginning. The question of whether the work was ‘operatic’ is central to the controversy, as most writers believed that, if it were so, it could not be good church music (or even good religious music).