Verdi’s Messa da Requiem

Ballett Zürich
Eleanor Lyons, Caitlin Hulcup, Paul O’Neill, Pelham Andrews
Adelaide Festival Chorus
Adelaide Symphony Orchestra

 
Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

Verdi composed his Messa da Requiem in honour of his older contemporary the Italian writer and humanist Manzoni, whom he admired not only as an artist but as a social and political liberal committed to the Risorgimento. As for Manzoni’s religious views, while not as anti-clerical as Verdi, his avowed Catholicism was similarly liberal, stressing that while Catholic doctrine might comprise the sum of all truths, it doesn’t do so exclusively. 

 

The work was first performed in a church (San Marco in Milan), and then almost immediately afterwards in an opera house (La Scala). Both were conducted by Verdi himself, and featuring four soloists who’d all previously been cast in the premiere of his most recent opera Aida. 

Ongoing quibbles about whether or not Verdi was sufficiently religious, or whether his Requiem is more inherently ‘dramatic’ or ‘spiritual’, surely miss the point. Like his operas, the work expresses the Shakespearean breadth of his vision, from the blazing heights of love to the sombre depths of tragedy. 

 

In 1943–4 it was performed sixteen times by the inmates of Theresienstadt concentration camp, using a single copy of the score and accompanied by a piano. Eichmann joked: ‘Those crazy Jews are singing their own requiem.’ 

More recently in 2021 it was performed at the Met to commemorate the 20^th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. In the words of the Dies Irae: ‘The day of wrath will dissolve the world in ashes.’ 

 

Speaking as someone who’s neither an Italian nor a Catholic, I can still find comfort and joy – as well as hearing pain and anguish – in Verdi’s Requiem. Like all great masterpieces, its meaning depends on the context, and its truth is revealed by history. 

However, the meaning and truth of a work of art – like the meaning and truth of a religious text – aren’t entirely contingent or open to interpretation. They also lie within the work or text itself, for those who have the eyes and ears to read or hear what it has to say.

 

Unfortunately, Christian Spuck’s production and choreography for Ballett Zürich not only turns a blind eye to the libretto but also appears to be deaf to what Verdi wrote. In fact music and dance are at such cross-purposes that after a while I found myself alternately closing my eyes to listen, or trying to block my ears and watch.

 

The dancers were certainly impressive, and the soloists gave their all and were mostly in glorious voice, though tenor Paul O’Neill showed signs of strain on the night I attended. The chorus did outstanding work (especially given the choreography they were called upon to execute while singing); and the orchestra played with distinction under the thoughtful baton of Johannes Fritzsch. However, apart from some thrilling outbursts from the percussion in the Dies Irae, the performance sounded lacklustre and the pace dragged. Possibly the conductor was directed to follow what was happening stage – which is the opposite of what music should do in relation to dance, and completely robbed the score of its autonomous character. 

 

Verdi’s music is nothing if not passionate and fiery – or alternatively pitch-dark. Spuck’s production on the contrary is all shades of grey and faded colours – from the set design, with its ash-covered floor and blackboard-like walls (which at one point the dancers use chalk to scribble on), to the drabness and pallor of the dancers’ costumes (apart from one flimsy black dress, and the staid black shirts and trousers worn by the soloists and chorus). 

 

As for the choreography: apart from occasional outbursts of sprinting or darting around, the movement was mostly languid and heavily indebted to classical ballet but without any of the latter’s sense of weightlessness or flight (instead there’s a lot of prolonged lifting, carrying and dragging). Meanwhile the poor soloists wandered slowly and portentously around the stage as if in a Wagner opera, looking for something to do and hoping forlornly to be included in the action, while their voices ascended vainly into the lighting grid. The chorus came off best: often crouching and moving intently en masse while singing with hushed intensity, like a shuffling horde of zombies, or perhaps a corps de ballet of the damned trapped in a choreographic hell. 

 

Possibly all of this was meant to make us feel ‘sad’. If so, ‘sad’ is the one thing Verdi’s music isn’t – tragic, defiant, raging, pleading, despairing, terrifying, liberating, soaring, beautiful, ethereal, but never ‘sad’. It’s a Requiem, but it’s not a dirge. 

 

The inmates at Theresienstadt were surely singing it as an act of resistance and freedom; as an expression of their love of life; as an accusation levelled at the Nazis and the watching but indifferent world; and as a desperate cry for help addressed to the Red Cross delegation who came to inspect the camp and came away apparently convinced by the Nazi propaganda machine that there was nothing sinister going on. Whatever the case, they certainly didn’t sing it because they were feeling ‘sad’.  

 

The bottom line is that Verdi’s Requiem isn’t written to be danced to. That doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t be danced to; but such an idea would call for something more energetic and transgressive than Spuck’s enervated and regressive choreography and staging. In other words: it would call for something more like Verdi’s Requiem. 

 

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Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born and raised in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Phänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. On returning to Austria he wasthe lead vocalist and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen), in which capacity as the band’s front-man he developed a unique form of contemporary folk dance combining elements inspired by Isadora Duncan with the traditional Austrian Schuhplattler. He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the formation of the far-right coalition federal government, vowing never to return. He’s currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He’s also the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.