Requiem Aeternam
My Love Affair with the Music of the Dead
I consider myself a hopeful person, and never more so than when I speak with my British friends. Nevertheless, there are few things in life that move me more deeply or excite me more thoroughly than musical settings of the Requiem Mass.
Yes, that’s right: the thing they play at funerals. The music meant to accompany the darkest moments of human existence is sweet honey to my ears.
Is this just one of those weird Amy things? you might be wondering. Is she trying too hard to channel Wednesday Addams? Is she shocking us to generate clicks? I will answer those last two with a “no” and “no,” though I cannot reasonably deny being weird.
However, I submit that my love for musical lament is not what makes me weird: rather, it makes me human. After all, life can be downright depressing. All of us must do something to ward off existential despair after viewing the day’s news. Lament is an important part of the mourning process, and there is always something worth mourning.
It is modern Western society’s aversion to mourning that is abnormal. Our ancestors knew how to do things properly. They could not hide from death as we can, shuttling the sick off to institutions or even offering them a medical way to “die with dignity.” There is nothing dignified about death and suffering. When I watched my grandmother and aunt successively eaten to the bone by neurological diseases, I was under no illusion that what they were going through was simply a “natural part of life,” a step on the way to higher being, or whatever nonsense people try to force upon the grieving. Death and suffering deserve to be mourned.
I recently read Matthew Lee Anderson’s newest book, Called into Questions. In it, he laments the absence of lament among today’s Christians. “Lament is the language God has given us to express our doubts to Him. For many of us, lament is a foreign language, as it has only a minor place in our church’s worship and life. I want to be unequivocal about this: the absence of lament in our churches is a failure to proclaim the whole counsel of God.”[1] (You can read Matt’s Substack newsletter here.)
There was a time when the Western Church understood how to mourn. When it composed a Mass for the dead, it did so in words tongued with fire, to borrow a phrase from T.S. Eliot.[2] It did not shrink from the reality of death and judgment, but dove headfirst into the dark abyss, praying to be raised to light perpetual.
Libera me, Domine, de morte æterna, in die illa tremenda
Quando cœli movendi sunt et terra
Dum veneris iudicare sæculum per ignem.
Meaning in English…
“Free me, Lord, from eternal death on that fearful day
When the heavens and the earth will be moved
When you come to judge the word by fire”
In passages like this, the traditional Requiem Mass does not shrink from affirming the supernatural. Life means something because it is connected to eternity. Death is not a peaceful passage, but an epic overturning: a giving way of the time of choice to the time of judgment. Many of the prayers in the Requiem simply plead for the deceased to be delivered from eternal fire.
When the Roman Catholic Church held the Second Vatican Council, it determined the Requiem Mass, which had served centuries upon centuries of Christians, should be focused more on the hope of resurrection than mourning and lamentation.[3] Unlike medieval peasants terrified of the plague, modern Christians preferred a more upbeat service with less talk of judgment. This was also the council that permitted churches to perform the liturgy in vernacular languages. Perhaps both developments were positive in their own ways, but they also meant the end of something great.
Every period of history has seen its own musical interpreters of the Requiem. The old Gregorian chant “Dies irae” remains influential, featuring in both Lizt’s Totentanz and Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. But the arrangement that really kicked things off was composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at the very end of his life. The coincidence that he was composing a Requiem Mass at the time he died has been the subject of much discussion, nowhere more so than in the musical Amadeus. Mozart’s setting of the poem “Lacrimosa” is one of the most used pieces of classical music in modern pop culture. I most recently heard it in season three of the Netflix series Lupin.
It seemed nearly impossible that anyone could top Mozart’s feat, but Giuseppi Verdi may have done so. I can think of no other music on earth that so perfectly captures the essence of divine judgment as his “Dies irae.” My husband and I were once fortunate enough to hear it performed at the Washington National Cathedral, and when the trumpets sounded the call of divine judgment, I could almost believe it was the voice of heaven.
Among twentieth century composers, the greatest work is likely Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, composed for the opening of Coventry’s new cathedral. Interspersed with readings from Wilfred Owen’s searing World War I poems, it captures the horrors of World War II from the opening notes, including the destruction of Coventry’s original medieval cathedral. Other composers who have tackled the Requiem include Brahms, Berlioz, Dvořák, and Rutter.
There is a reason so many composers have returned to this ancient text for inspiration: nothing conjures human emotion quite like death. What could be more important or fearsome? In taking a subject of horror and transliterating it into the beauty of music, these composers give voice to our deepest fears and longings, providing us with a proper language for lament.
It was during a period of severe anxiety that I first came to love Verdi’s Requiem. I would wake in the morning with my pulse racing, my body rigid and pinned to the bed. “Libera me,” I would pray. “Free me, Lord. Deliver me.” A few years later, as I suffered through a year of chronic pain and fatigue, it was John Rutter’s setting of Psalm 130 (“Out of the Deep”) that spoke to me powerfully.
When the world grows particularly dark, I find myself returning to those great compositions to hear both darkness and light. Yes, somehow you can hear darkness and light, even as you can feel them in your bones.
“Tremens factus sum ego, et timeo,” the text reads. “I am made to tremble, and I fear.” This is biblical language describing the reality of human existence under the sun. In this life, we tremble and fear. We are beset by trials and tribulations. We cannot escape the darkness by ignoring it. Rather, we must acknowledge it openly, allowing ourselves to grieve that we might be comforted.
The two novels I penned in 2022 are tentatively titled Fear and Trembling: Parts I and II. I wrote them as Russian tanks were rolling into Ukraine and the world was still attempting to recover from the most severe epidemic in generations. More than that, I wrote them as I attempted to raise a child—What could be more terrifying? Through all my struggles with anxiety and depression, and the countless times I have remembered my death, I have learned that lament is an appropriate and necessary part of human existence.
In the words of the Requiem, we reach out to the light perpetual which will grant us eternal rest: an end to our fear and trembling. “Pie Jesu Domine, dona eis requiem.” Yes, merciful Lord, grant us rest in the hereafter from our labors under the sun. Bring an end to our suffering and lighten our darkness.
The last enemy that will be destroyed is death.
Can’t get enough of me here? Why not follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Threads, or Instagram?
PUBLISHED ELSEWHERE:
“Martin Chemnitz and God’s Election of His Own” at 1517
[1] Anderson, Matthew Lee. Called into Questions: Cultivating the Love of Learning within the Life of Faith (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2023), 68.
[2] From Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding”: “And what the dead had no speech for, when living, / They can tell you, being dead: the communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”
[3] See Sacrosanctum Concilium III.81: “The rite for the burial of the dead should express more clearly the paschal character of Christian death, and should correspond more closely to the circumstances and traditions found in various regions.” https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19631204_sacrosanctum-concilium_en.html
I am struck by the way you cannot appreciate joy without suffering. It is important to live all of life. Understanding the pain of others is dependent on having had pain ourselves.
Thank you for sharing these words, Amy. Ironically, this was a beautiful read, even as you mused on death and the Requiem. Mozart’s rendition will always be my favorite.