Music Spotlight: Fauré's Requiem

Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem, Op. 48 is part of a long tradition of master composers who have addressed death through this liturgical musical setting. Fauré composed the Requiem in 1888 “for the pleasure of it,” though the composer may also have intended the work as a musical tribute to his father, who had died three years earlier.

Fauré’s long-time experience in playing the organ for funerals may have influenced the nature of his work, dramatically different in scale and in tone from other well-known settings; namely, those by Hector Berlioz (1837) and Giuseppe Verdi (1874). Rather than focusing on the morbid and fear of death, Fauré describes his work as being “dominated from beginning to end by a very human feeling of faith in eternal rest.”

The Requiem was first performed in 1888 at L’église de la Madeleine (Madeleine Church) in Paris for the funeral of architect Joseph Lesoufaché, with Fauré himself leading the performance. The original version was scored for a choir accompanied by a small orchestra and contained five movements (“Introït and Kyrie,’ ‘Sanctus,’ ‘Pie Jesu,’ ‘Agnus Dei,’ and ‘In Paradisum’), chosen to emphasize themes of peace and eternal rest.  Over the years, Fauré would augment the Requiem, adding two movements (‘Offertoire’ and ‘Libera Me’) and expand the orchestration to a full symphonic orchestral arrangement.

In a 1902 interview, Fauré stated: “It has been said that my Requiem does not express the fear of death and someone has called it a lullaby of death. But it is thus that I see death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than as a painful experience. Perhaps 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 wanted to write something different.”

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