Messa da
Requiem

Messa da Requiem - Verdi

Giuseppe Verdi's Requiem is one of the most powerful sacred works in classical music. Verdi originally envisaged a mass in homage to Rossini, but it was the death of Alessandro Manzoni, an Italian writer admired by Verdi for his humanist and patriotic commitment, that led the composer to imagine this spiritual gesture expressing his fascination with the existential questions of universal judgement and the human condition.

Verdi brings an almost operatic dramatic intensity to the Catholic liturgical texts, as in the famous evocation of divine wrath and the Last Judgement in the Dies Irae, with its striking percussion and choral outbursts. 

This source material could not fail to inspire César Vayssié, film director and multi-talented artist, who ventures beyond the boundaries of cinema towards a living art form, exploring here for the first time its relationship with choral voice. There is every chance that this dialogue between images and the language of dance will reveal in the conducting of Korean conductor Sora Elisabeth Lee an energy comparable to that she displayed in the triptych Héroïne, performed last year at the Opéra national de Nancy-Lorraine.

'Day of wrath, day of vengeance,
day of destruction,
the earth shall be made a desolation.'

A film and a book to delve deeper:

• The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet), Ingmar Bergman, 1957: The Swedish filmmaker's masterpiece depicts a knight playing chess with Death during the Black Death. The existential questions and confrontation with death echo the themes of the Requiem.

• L'Homme devant la mort (Philippe Ariès): A classic work on the place of death in Western culture, linked to the dramaturgy of the Requiem. (Seuil)