Saturday, November 24, 2007


The Requiem (from Latin requiem, accusative case of requies, rest) or Requiem Mass (informally, a funeral Mass), also known formally (in Latin) as the Missa pro defunctis or Missa defunctorum, is a liturgical service of the Roman Catholic Church, Anglo-Catholic and High Church Anglicans, as well as certain Lutheran Churches in the United States. There is also a requiem, with a wholly different ritual form and texts, that is observed in the Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Churches. The common theme of requiems is prayer for the salvation of the soul(s) of the departed, and it is used both at services immediately preceding a burial, and on occasions of more general remembrance.
"Requiem" is also the title of various musical compositions used in such liturgical services or as concert pieces as settings of the portions of that Mass which have been traditionally sung in the Roman Catholic liturgy.
While the prayers in the regular Mass as the Introit and Gradual change according to the Calendar of Saints, the text for the requiem Mass is particularly fixed. Originally such funeral musical compositions were meant to be performed in liturgical service, with monophonic chant. Eventually the dramatic character began to appeal to composers to an extent that made the requiem a genre of its own.

The Roman Rite liturgy
For many centuries the texts of the requiem were sung to Gregorian melodies. The Requiem by Johannes Ockeghem, written sometime in the latter half of the 15th century, is the earliest surviving polyphonic setting. There was a setting by the elder composer Dufay, possibly earlier, which is now lost: Ockeghem's may have been modelled on it. Other composers who wrote Requiems before 1550 include Pedro de Escobar, Antoine de Févin, Cristóbal Morales, and Pierre de La Rue; that by La Rue is probably the second oldest, after Ockeghem's.
Over 2,000 requiems have been composed to the present day. Typically the Renaissance settings, especially those not written on the Iberian Peninsula, may be performed a cappella (i.e. without necessary accompanying instrumental parts), whereas beginning around 1600 composers more often preferred to use instruments to accompany a choir, and also include vocal soloists. There is great variation between compositions in how much of liturgical text is set to music.
Most composers omit sections of the liturgical prescription, most frequently the Gradual and the Tract. Fauré omits the Dies iræ, while the very same text had often been set by French composers in previous centuries as a stand-alone work.
Sometimes composers divide an item of the liturgical text into two or more movements; because of the length of its text, the Dies iræ is the most frequently divided section of the text (as with Mozart, for instance). The Introit and Kyrie, being immediately adjacent in the actual Roman Catholic liturgy, are often composed as one movement.
Musico-thematic relationships among movements of Requiems can be found as well.

Musical compositions
Some settings contain additional texts, such as the devotional motet Pie Jesu (in the settings of Dvořák, Fauré, Duruflé, and Lloyd Webber—Fauré set it as a soprano solo in the center). Libera me (from the Absolution) and In paradisum (from the burial service, which in the case of a funeral follows after the Mass) conclude some compositions. Other added movements have been composed as well, such as the English Psalms Out of the Deep and The Lord is My Shepherd included in John Rutter's setting.

Added movements


Libera me, Domine, de morte æterna, in die illa tremenda, quando coeli movendi sunt et terra, dum veneris iudicare sæculum per ignem. Tremens factus sum ego et timeo, dum discussio venerit atque ventura ira. Dies illa, dies iræ, calamitatis, et miseriæ, dies magna et amara valde. Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.

("Deliver me, O Lord, from eternal death on that fearful day, when the heavens and the earth are moved, when you will come to judge the world with fire. I am made to tremble and I fear, because of the judgment that will come, and also the coming wrath. That day, day of wrath, calamity, and misery, day of great and exceeding bitterness. Grant them eternal rest, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.")

Libera me


In paradisum deducant te Angeli; in tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres, et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Ierusalem. Chorus angelorum te suscipiat, et cum Lazaro quondam paupere æternam habeas requiem.

("May angels lead you into Paradise; may the martyrs receive you at your coming and lead you to the holy city of Jerusalem. May a choir of angels receive you, and with Lazarus, who once was poor, may you have eternal rest.")

Requiem In paradisum

Main article: Pie Jesu Pie Jesu
Beginning in the 18th century and continuing through the 19th, many composers wrote what are effectively concert requiems, which by virtue of employing forces too large, or lasting such a considerable duration, prevent them being readily used in an ordinary funeral service; the requiems of Gossec, Berlioz, Verdi, and Dvořák are essentially dramatic concert oratorios. A counter-reaction to this tendency came from the Cecilian movement, which recommended restrained accompaniment for liturgical music, and frowned upon the use of operatic vocal soloists.

Non-Roman Catholic requiems

Main article: Kaddish Jewish Mourners' Kaddish

Main article: Memorial service (Orthodox) Eastern Orthodox Requiem
The Anglican Book of Common Prayer contains seven texts which are collectively known as "funeral sentences"; several composers have written settings of these seven texts, which are generally known collectively as a "burial service." Composers who have set the Anglican burial service to music include Thomas Morley, Orlando Gibbons, and Henry Purcell. The text of these seven sentences, from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, is:

I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.
I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shalt stand at the latter day upon the earth. And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another.
We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the Name of the Lord.
Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.
In the midst of life we are in death: of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased? Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.
Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts; shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer; but spare us, Lord most holy, O God most mighty, O holy and merciful Saviour, thou most worthy judge eternal, suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.
I heard a voice from heaven, saying unto me, Write, From henceforth blessed are the dead which die in the Lord: even so saith the Spirit: for they rest from their labours. Anglican burial service
In the 20th century the requiem evolved in several new directions. The genre of war requiems is perhaps the most notable, which comprise of compositions dedicated to the memory of people killed in wartime. These often include extra-liturgical poems of a pacifist or non-liturgical nature; for example, the War Requiem of Benjamin Britten juxtaposes the Latin text with the poetry of Wilfred Owen, and Robert Steadman's Mass in Black intersperses environmental poetry and prophecies of Nostradamus. The several Holocaust requiems may be regarded as a specific subset of this type. The World Requiem of John Foulds was written in the aftermath of the First World War and initiated the Royal British Legion's annual festival of remembrance.
Lastly, the 20th century saw the development of secular requiems, written for public performance without specific religious observance (e.g., Kabalevsky's War Requiem, to poems by Robert Rozhdestvensky). Herbert Howells's unaccompanied Requiem uses Psalm 23 ("The Lord is my shepherd"), Psalm 121 ("I will lift up mine eyes"), "Salvator mundi" ("O Saviour of the world," in English), "Requiem aeternam" (two different settings), and "I heard a voice from heaven." Some composers have written purely instrumental works bearing the title of requiem, as exemplified by the most famous of these, Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem. Igor Stravinsky's Requiem canticles mixes instrumental movements with segments of the "Introit," "Dies irae," "Pie Jesu," and "Libera me."

20th century developments
See also: Requiems
Many composers have written Requiems. Some of the most famous include:

Johannes Ockeghem's Requiem, the earliest to survive, written sometime in the mid-to-late 15th century
Victoria's Requiem of 1603, (part of a longer Office for the Dead)
Mozart's Requiem in D minor (Mozart died before its completion)
Berlioz' Grande Messe des Morts
Verdi's Requiem
Brahms' Ein deutsches Requiem, based on passages from Luther's Bible.
Fauré's Requiem in D minor
Dvořák's Requiem, Op. 89
Britten's War Requiem, which incorporated poems by Wilfred Owen.
Duruflé's Requiem, based almost exclusively on the chants from the Graduale Romanum. Famous Requiems

Other Requiem composers

Giovanni Francesco Anerio
Gianmatteo Asola
Giulio Belli
Antoine Brumel
Manuel Cardoso
Joan Cererols
Pierre Certon
Clemens non Papa
Guillaume Dufay (lost)
Pedro de Escobar
Antoine de Févin
Francisco Guerrero
Jacobus de Kerle
Orlande de Lassus
Duarte Lobo
Jean Maillard
Jacques Mauduit
Manuel Mendes
Cristóbal de Morales
Johannes Ockeghem (the earliest to survive)
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina
Costanzo Porta
Johannes Prioris
Jean Richafort
Pierre de la Rue
Claudin de Sermisy
Jacobus Vaet
Tomás Luis de Victoria Renaissance

Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber
Marc-Antoine Charpentier
Jean Gilles
Claudio Monteverdi (lost)
Michael Praetorius
Heinrich Schütz
Jan Dismas Zelenka
Antonio Lotti (Requiem in F Major) Baroque

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Luigi Cherubini
Florian Leopold Gassmann
François-Joseph Gossec
Michael Haydn
Andrea Luchesi
José Maurício Nunes Garcia Classical period

Hector Berlioz
João Domingos Bomtempo
Johannes Brahms
Anton Bruckner
Carl Czerny
Gaetano Donizetti
Antonín Dvořák
Gabriel Fauré
Charles Gounod
Franz Liszt
Max Reger
Camille Saint-Saëns
Robert Schumann
Franz von Suppé
Charles Villiers Stanford
Giuseppe Verdi
Richard Wetz
See also: Messa per Rossini Romantic era

Malcolm Archer
Vyacheslav Artyomov
Osvaldas Balakauskas
Alfred Desenclos
Ralph Dunstan
Maurice Duruflé
Hans Werner Henze
Herbert Howells
Karl Jenkins
Joonas Kokkonen
Cyrillus Kreek
György Ligeti
Frigyes Hidas
Frank Martin
Krzysztof Penderecki
Ildebrando Pizzetti
Jocelyn Pook
Zbigniew Preisner
John Rutter
Alfred Schnittke
Valentin Silvestrov
Robert Steadman
Igor Stravinsky
Toru Takemitsu
John Tavener
Erkki-Sven Tüür
Andrew Lloyd Webber Post-romantic/20th century

Kentaro Sato
Karl Jenkins
Tyzen Hsiao New Era/21st century
English with Latin
German
French, English, German with Latin
Polish with Latin
Russian
Taiwanese

Benjamin Britten
Evgeni Kostitsyn
Herbert Howells
John Rutter
Michael Praetorius
Heinrich Schütz
Franz Schubert
Johannes Brahms
Edison Denisov
Krzysztof Penderecki
Zbigniew Preisner
Sergei Taneyev - Cantata John of Damascus, Op.1 (Text by Alexey Tolstoy)
Dmitri Kabalevsky - War Requiem (Text by Robert Rozhdestvensky)
Elena Firsova - Requiem, Op.100 (Text by Anna Akhmatova)
Tyzen Hsiao - Ilha Formosa: Requiem for the Formosan Martyrs (Text by Yang-Min Lin), 2001 Requiems by language (other than purely Latin)

The Swedish progressive death metal band Opeth has a song named "Requiem" on their 1995 album Orchid.
Jethro Tull has a song named "Requiem" on their album Minstrel in the Gallery.
Alexander Borodin composed a "Requiem" piece for the collaborative piano work Paraphrases, which is a set of pieces based on the theme commonly known as "Chopsticks".
In a parody of a medieval geisslerlied, the monks in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail chant the Pie Jesu while striking themselves with punch card sized wooden boards.
"Requiem of Spirit" was a song in the popular Nintendo 64 video game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
Requiem for a Dream was a novel written by Hubert Selby, Jr. and was later adapted into a critically acclaimed film (2000) by Darren Aronofsky.
Jesper Kyd is a popular composer who has composed Requiem songs for many videogames, the Hitman series being among the most popular.
In 1983 Pink Floyd released an album called The Final Cut. The album's secondary title was "A Requiem for the Post-War dream".
"Requiem for a Sinner" is the opening track on the 1977 album World Anthem by Canadian hard rock band Frank Marino & Mahogany Rush, and most fans consider it to be one of their best songs.
Requiem is the title of the upcoming, debut album from Hip-Hop artist One-Way.
Requiem is the closing section in Arthur Miller's famous play, Death of a Salesman.
"Requiem for a city", by Mike Oldfield, is the second track of the soundtrack to the movie The Killing Fields.
Black Metal band Sigh based their album Hangman's Hymn on the Catholic Requiem. The album contains sampled sections of the Requiem.
The group Gregorian sang a Requiem (in English/Latin) on their 2004 album The Dark Side.
American musician Jandek released an album called White Box Requiem in 1996.
Requiem is the closing section in Elizabeth (1998).
The punk band Bad Religion has a song named "Requiem for Dissent" on their album New Maps of Hell (2007).
The anime series Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann has a song named "'Libera Me' From Hell" which combines operatic verses from "Libera Me" with rock and rap style music.
The German power metal band Blind Guardian released the song 'Inquisition,' which repeates the Jesu Domine section, in their album Follow the Blind. They also released a song called 'The Script for my Requiem' in the album Immaginations from the Other Side.
The band, I Am Ghost released their newest CD in 2006, Lovers' Requiem, which has two songs containing much of these lyrics, Crossing The River Styx, and The Denouement. They are in the Italian language.
There is a "Requiem for Evita" in Evita
Album from Swedish band Bathory
Requiem is Seymour's Overdrive from Final Fantasy X
Title of a piece by Yoko Kanno for the anime series Wolf's Rain.
Requiem for a Nun a novel by William Faulkner
Requiem is also the name of Siegfried's sword from the Soul Calibur series See also

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