Antonín Dvorák

When Franz Joseph Haydn landed on English soil on New Year's Day of 1791, an important English musical tradition was quietly established. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produced few native English composers of any real note, so the practical music-loving aristocracy of London came up with a delightful way to ensure continued involvement in European music: they would, from time to time, invite a continental composer over for an extended stay or perhaps many shorter ones, treat him like royalty, play his music, and, eventually, send him along on his way. Antonín Dvorák was, in the 1880s and early 1890s, one of those composers lucky enough to enjoy this English lionization. As London had treasured its choral society tradition for many long decades by the time Dvorák arrived, it isn't surprising that his hosts and benefactors were particularly interested in coaxing him into composing new choral music for them. The Requiem Mass, Op. 89, for vocal soloists, chorus, and orchestra of 1890 is the product of one such commission.

Dvorák already had a host of sacred choral music under his belt when he tackled the Requiem texts. Still, the task was not one to be taken lightly; the composer was passionate about his Catholic faith and spent ten full months working on Op. 89. He chose to allow the work's 13 musical numbers (reckoning the Dies Irae as six numbers rather than one large one) to fall into their two natural groups: Part I contains the texts of sorrow, lament, and wrath (Requiem aeternam and Dies Irae), while Part II contains the texts of comfort and divine grace (Offertorium, Hostias et preces, Sanctus, Pie Jesu, and Agnus Dei).

A four-note chromatic motif (F -- G flat -- E -- F) is mumbled, pianissimo and in unison, by the strings at the start of the opening number; this motif will be found in one guise or another throughout most of the hour-and-a-half-long Requiem. Dvorák bestows upon his Requiem generous helpings of lovely, colorful vocal melody -- the unusual contours of the soprano solo in the No. 2 Gradual are especially appealing, as are the multiple soloistic ventures of the No. 10 Hostias et preces. The work still bears all the signs of having been composed by a man whose thoughts are generally instrumental: structure is paramount, and when, as in much of the Dies Irae sequence, the instrumentalists get carried away and start to approach the intense drama as a kind of texted symphony, far be it from the singers to get in their way. But the closing bars of the final Agnus Dei are masterful -- the quartet of soloists and the chorus exchange gently throbbing bits of chant-like homophony, the orchestra softly takes over their glowing B flat major and, twisting and turning around through the four-note chromatic motif, finds the way back to the same near-unbearable B flat minor in which the Requiem began.