The Composition
Verdi's Requiem was composed as a memorial to the Italian poet and novelist Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873), whose death on 22 May 1873 deeply moved Verdi. The premiere took place at the Church of San Marco in Milan on 22 May 1874, the first anniversary of Manzoni's death, conducted by Verdi himself. A second performance two days later at La Scala was even more enthusiastically received. The work runs approximately eighty-five minutes and is scored for soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor, and bass soloists, large chorus, and full orchestra including an off-stage brass band.
Verdi had begun working on a collective Messa per Rossini - a requiem mass to be composed collaboratively by thirteen Italian composers to honor Gioachino Rossini after his death in 1868 - contributing the final movement, the Libera me. When the collective project collapsed, Verdi incorporated this Libera me into his Manzoni Requiem and composed the rest of the mass around it. The Requiem thus grew from a private memorial tribute into one of the most monumental sacred works of the Romantic era.
Biblical Text
The Latin Requiem Mass text draws on multiple biblical sources. The Introit ('Rest eternal grant to them, O Lord') reflects 2 Maccabees 12:43-45 and the broader tradition of Jewish prayers for the dead. The Dies irae sequence, which occupies the longest and most dramatic section of Verdi's setting, is a thirteenth-century Latin poem based on Zephaniah 1:14-16 ('a day of wrath, a day of distress and anguish'), Matthew 25:31-46 (the Last Judgment), and Daniel 12:2 ('Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt'). The Offertorium draws on Daniel 3:22 and the Agnus Dei on John 1:29.
The theological arc of the Requiem moves from the prayer for rest (Introit/Kyrie) through the terror of judgment (Dies irae) to the supplication for mercy (Agnus Dei) and finally to the personal confession and plea of the Libera me - 'Deliver me, O Lord, from eternal death on that dreadful day when the heavens and earth shall be shaken.' The work's emotional honesty lies in the fact that Verdi - a religious skeptic - does not resolve this plea with assured faith but leaves it in the air, the final fugue collapsing and the soprano left alone repeating 'Libera me' in a dying pianissimo.
The Composer
Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) had a complex relationship with organized religion. Born and raised Catholic, he became skeptical of institutional religion as an adult and refused a Christian burial for his parents, preferring to mark their deaths privately. Yet his engagement with biblical texts and sacred music throughout his career - from the Hebrew chorus of Nabucco (1842) through the Requiem to his final operatic settings of Shakespeare's Othello and Falstaff - reveals a man who took seriously the claims of religion even as he resisted institutional affiliation. The Requiem is his most direct engagement with Christian eschatology, and its emotional power derives partly from the fact that Verdi prays it without certainty of being heard.
Musical Analysis
The opening Requiem aeternam is hushed and intimate, the chorus entering pp on a bare unison, the strings barely audible. The Kyrie eleison introduces the four soloists in an operatically characterized ensemble whose intertwining voices create the impression of four individuals - not just four voice-types - confronting mortality and pleading for mercy.
The Dies irae sequence is the work's center and its most operatically explicit section. The opening 'Dies irae, dies illa' is introduced by a bass drum stroke of terrifying force - the loudest moment in standard orchestral writing - followed by the brass in violent unison. The 'Tuba mirum' brings on-stage and off-stage brass in spatial orchestration that makes the Last Trump tangible and spatial. The soprano solo 'Liber scriptus' is operatic recitative of extraordinary intensity, the melody climbing and plunging with the urgency of someone reading their own sentence of judgment. The Lacrimosa, which closes the Dies irae sequence, is among the most genuinely grief-stricken movements Verdi ever wrote, the orchestra and voices weeping together in phrases of falling chromatic scales.
The Agnus Dei is a moment of severe simplicity: soprano and mezzo-soprano sing the melody unaccompanied in parallel octaves - a sound that is simultaneously ancient (suggesting plainchant) and modern - before the chorus joins. The Libera me returns to the material of the opening in a kind of fearful recapitulation before attempting a fugue on 'Libera me' that is explicitly modeled on Bach and Handel but whose academic confidence fractures under the weight of the text's urgency.
Theological Content
The Verdi Requiem has provoked debate about whether it is genuinely sacred music or opera in church clothes - the phrase 'an opera in ecclesiastical vestments' (usually attributed to Hans von Bülow, though the attribution is disputed) captured a widespread sense that the dramatic intensity of the work exceeded what was appropriate to liturgical music. Verdi himself insisted it was a sincere tribute, and the distinction may be false: the operatic intensity of his settings derives from the same source as the theatrical intensity of his operas - a total engagement with human emotional truth. A God who is dramatically invoked at fff fortissimo may be no less genuinely invoked than one addressed in pianissimo.
Performance History
The Requiem was an immediate international success, performed in Paris (1874), London (1875), and throughout Europe within two years of its premiere. Verdi conducted it many times himself, including a celebrated London performance. It has been performed continuously since and is now one of the three or four most frequently performed choral works in the repertoire, alongside Handel's Messiah, Brahms's German Requiem, and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
Notable Recordings
The discography is enormous. Arturo Toscanini's 1951 NBC Symphony recording set an early standard of dramatic urgency. Carlo Maria Giulini's 1963 recording with the Philharmonia Orchestra, featuring the great quartet of Schwarzkopf, Ludwig, Gedda, and Ghiaurov, is widely regarded as the finest. More recent recordings by Abbado (Berlin, 2001) and Muti (multiple accounts) maintain the operatic tradition. For a more liturgically measured approach, Daniel Barenboim's 2001 Milan Scala recording is notable.
Legacy
The Verdi Requiem fundamentally changed the conception of what a choral sacred work could be. By bringing the full resources and emotional directness of nineteenth-century opera to a liturgical text, Verdi expanded the expressive range of sacred music at the cost of some liturgical propriety - and the bargain has been widely accepted. Its influence on subsequent requiem composers, from Brahms (who heard it and admired it) through Britten to Lloyd Webber, is direct. It also is a profound document of a particular kind of religious seriousness: the engagement with divine judgment and mercy by someone who fears both and is certain of neither.