All Saints service of worship featuring the Fauré Requiem
Sunday, November 6, 2022 • 10:30 a.m. worship
The Choir of Highlands United Methodist Church
Richard Phillips, Choirmaster and Organist
Thomas Head, baritone
Tessa Brown, soprano
This Solemn Requiem, one of the many jewels in the liturgical crown of worship, begins and ends in silence. In between, glorious music, full of yearning and hope, fills the church and our hearts as we remember all those who have gone before us.
The setting of the REQUIEM by Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) has become one of the most well known and frequently performed works of the 20th century. The composer began work on the score in 1887, for no apparent reason, although his mother died during the early stages of the work’s composition; the first performance given at La Madeleine in Paris in 1888 was dedicated to her memory. A year after that first performance, Fauré added two more movements, the Offertoire and the Libera Me, and the work that we know was first performed in full at La Madeleine in January 1893. The texts chosen by Fauré for his Requiem are not entirely in keeping with the conventional structure of the Requiem Mass, and his desire to represent the more peaceful aspects of death is represented in his choice of the In Paradisum from the Burial Service to end the work. The last two lines of the Sequence for the Dead (Pie Jesu) are also, unusually, turned into a complete movement. Indeed, the composer limits the Dies Irae to a few bars (where Verdi and Mozart wrote vivid and powerful full movements), returning very quickly to the serenity and calm that characterize the whole piece. When criticized for avoiding the horrors of purgatory and the Last Judgement, Fauré replied, “It has been said that my Requiem does not express the fear of death, and some have called it a lullaby of death. But it is thus that I see death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than as a painful experience.”