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| La Recoleta - Buenos Aires |
Requiem: The Music for the Requiem Mass is any music that accompanies the Requiem, a Mass in the Catholic Church for the deceased. It has inspired a large number of compositions, including settings by Mozart, Berlioz, Donizetti, Verdi, Bruckner, Dvořák, Fauré and Duruflé. Originally, such compositions were meant to be performed in liturgical service, with monophonic chant. Eventually the dramatic character of the text began to appeal to composers to an extent that they made the requiem a genre of its own, and the compositions of composers such as Verdi are essentially concert pieces rather than liturgical works.
Wikipedia
Requiem is the first word in the Roman Catholic Mass section called the introit:
Eternal rest give unto them, O Lord,
and let perpetual light shine upon them.
A hymn, O God, becometh Thee in Zion;
and a vow shall be paid to Thee in Jerusalem:
hear my prayer;
all flesh shall come to Thee.
Eternal rest give unto them, O Lord,
and let perpetual light shine upon them.
Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine:
et lux perpetua luceat eis.
Te decet hymnus, Deus, in Sion,
et tibi reddetur votum in Ierusalem:
exaudi orationem meam,
ad te omnis caro veniet.
Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine:
et lux perpetua luceat eis.
And about that special Buenos Aires cemetery - La Recoleta
On October 23 my daughter Hilary and I will be going to a performance of Mozart’s Requiem in d Minor with Leslie Dala directing the Bach Choir.
My daughter Hilary has such a fondness for this requiem that she gave me the CD years ago when we were living in Kerrisdale.
The word requiem immediately brings me to my childhood memory of Eva Duarte de Perón’s death on July 26, 1952. I was 10 years old and I believed then that death and lottery tickets (the winning ones) only happened to my neighbours and never to us or me.
Argentines, more than any other Spanish heritage nation (with the exception of the Mexicans who have a much more healthy and realistic view of death) have an obsession with death. They are especially adept at cutting fingers and other body parts of buried presidents. They did dismember Juan Domingo Peron's hands from his family cript at the Chacarita Cemetery. And for a while they did kidnap Evita's coffin. We do know that while in Madrid, Perón kept his wife’s coffin (with a viewable window) in his living room.
When Evita died there was immediate national mourning. The elaborate funeral was preceded by a huge wake called a capilla ardiente or burning chapel. It was during these proceedings that I first heard funeral music and in particular, the third movement of Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 2.
It was about then that my neighbour’s son hit a train at a street level crossing on his motor scooter. I believe that my mother wanted me to see what death was. The young man’s reconstituted face in the open coffin remained in my memory for many years.
Five minutes after Evita’s death was announced, for at least a year every night in every Argentine radio station at 20:25 we would hear:
“Son las 20:25, hora en que Eva Perón, jefa espiritual de la nación pasó a la inmortalidad”..
“It is 20:25, the hour in which Eva Perón, spiritual leader of the nation, passed to inmortality.”
Death did not affect me personally until sometime in 1966 when I was a conscript in the Argentine Navy and my uncle (not a real one) Leo Mahdjubian, called me and said, “Your father kicked the bucket yesterday. He was taken to hospital already dead by a policeman so you have to go to the police station today or tomorrow."
Such was the effect of that death on me that the whole year before it, all those weekend moments when I visited him, are all erased from my memory.
But it was in the early months of my naval conscription that since I was a new sailor, I was given the worst assignments. It was a hot summer and I was dispatched to the Chacarita Cemetery to stand guard by the open casket of a non-commissioned officer I had never met. Having to stand all day in attention, smelling all the flowers in the horrible heat was a memory that I have forgotten (or tried to forget).
My mother, 59, died, in 1972 in Mexico City. My Rosemary and
I watched her as she breathed in for the last time and did not exhale. There was no doctor to be found so a nearby veterinarian signed a provisional death certificate.
And of course, since that date, I have had many friends and mentors die and then on December 9, 2020 it was Rosemary who died. My 52 years with her prove that I did win the lottery.
In preparation for that Mozart Requiem I have been thinking
of funereal music.
I wondered if jazz had any of it. Three came to mind and I will link to performances below after my explanation.
It was a cold Buenos Aires winter in 1967 when I received a phone call from my girlfriend Susy. She told me that I had no future and that I was a man with no culture. She was dumping me for the violinist of the Teatro Colón Philharmonic and I was not to call her ever again.
At the time I thought that the only way to combat a deep depression and loneliness was to hit a rock bottom depression. I found it in two Miles Davis records. One was Soleá in his Sketches of Spain that follows (in your imagination) a marching band through the streets of Seville during Holy Week. The other is definitely very blue as is All Blues in Davis’s Kind of Blue.
The third composition, St. James Infirmary, is not quite so mournful. It is very dramatic and my favourite version is the one by Louis Armstrong.
Somehow I overcame my depression and by the end of that year I found my winning lottery ticket, my Rosemary in December in Mexico City.