'Requiem sempiternam'? Death and the musical requiem in the twentieth century

Abstract

The requiem is one of the oldest continuously existing musical genres; since the late fifteenth century there has been a long chain of more than 3000 compositions engaging in one way or another with the Latin mass of the dead. The earliest surviving setting1was written by Johannes Ockeghem (ca. 1410-1497); among the best-known recent ones are works by Benjamin Britten, Andrew Lloyd-Webber or John Rutter. This article addresses a particular category of requiem compositions of the twentieth century, in which the composers focus not on the death of an individual (as requiem compositions in previous centuries invariably did) but rather on the death of many, caused by human activities such as war, genocide or terror. While death as a biological phenomenon is inevitable and cannot be avoided, most of the deaths that these works refer to occurred due to human actions which could (and maybe should) have been prevented. The composers thus emphasise political or societal wrongs. Up to a point, these works are meant to educate as much as to entertain, comfort and commemorate. In this article, I argue that most of the important and regularly performed requiem compositions since about the First World War belong to this category. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.