STAGE AND SCREEN
MUSIC
Verdi's Te Deum and Requiem Mass
EVER since Hans von Billow, outraged to the depth of his German soul nurtured upon the " three B's," and blinded at the time by the splendour of Wagner, slated Verdi's Requiem Mass for its theatricality, that reproach has been re-echoed in the corridors of concert-halls. From a reasonable criticism —reasonable, that is, given Billow's point of view and the circumstances of the Requiem's production in an opera-house amid all the excitement and enthusiasm of a first night— it has become the catch-word of musical parrots. Billow, himself, revised his opinion and handsomely apologised to Verdi for his bestialitd giornalistica. He went on to quote Leopardi (" nothing is more destructive than injustice, nothing more intolerable than intolerance "), and ended by hailing Verdi as " the Wagner of our dear allies," a reference to an earlier Berlin-Rome axis. Verdi in reply, after modestly suggesting that Billow's first thoughts might after all have been best, returned the compliment by quoting Wagner (" Each man should maintain the peculiar characteristics
of his own country "), adding : You are happy in being still the children of Bach ! And we ? We, the children of Palestrina, may one day have a great school of our own."
Nothing, on the face of it, could be less like Palestrina than Verdi's Requiem with its dramatic violence and its frankly operatic melodies. Yet Verdi might more truly claim to be the child of Palestrina than those composers who write Church music in an archaistic style of polyphony. The relationship is distant, but it will be evident enough to anyone who can look below the surface, in many pages of the Requiem. An obvious example occurs in the opening movement, where Te decet hymnus is set to a severely liturgical melody treated in canon. But even in the " Kyrie," where the solo voices are deployed in a phrase striding grandly over four bars and ornamented in a characteristically operatic manner, the handling of this material differs in no important principle (except that the orchestra adds its colour to the contrapuntal texture) from the procedure of the sixteenth-century composer.
This affinity to the older music is even more apparent in Verdi's Te Deum, which preceded the Requiem at Signor Toscanini's concert in the Queen's Hall on Monday. Here is a work entirely based upon two plain-song themes, the first of which is announced senza misura (as in Hoist's The Hymn of Jesus) by the choral basses without accompaniment. This differs in no way from Palestrina's procedure in composing the Mass Assumpta est Maria, except that he used one theme for the basis of the whole composition. But Verdi, composing at a time long distant from the age of plain-song and musically not in close sympathy with its spirit, translated his material into the terms of his own contemporary musical language. It is extraordinarily interesting to see how out of the opening chant he develops a melody so typically Verdian, that one has to rub one's eyes to make sure that its notes are the same as those of the original theme.
Like all great composers, Verdi shows that an old method of composition can always be turned to new account by the use of imagination. This Te Deum, his last composition, is a masterpiece of great subtlety, not to be fully appreciated at once, because its genuine musical quality is somewhat obscured by the obvious and sometimes strepitous contrasts of dynamics which Verdi characteristically imposed upon it. It is not so " great " a work as the Requiem, in the sense that it is not so large, nor so immediately attractive in its melody, nor so compelling in obvious dramatic effect. Yet as a musical composition it ranks very high among settings of the canticle.
Verdi once claimed that though he was not a learned he was a very experienced composer. It will be evident from what has been said that this is too modest an estimate. Yet he was right in stressing the importance to himself of practical experience. With every work he composed, he made some discovery of new effects, discarded some weakness that was now perceived. In this way, although his music from first to last remains funda- mentally the same, he developed a technique of adapting the very sin p e and straightforward material at his disposal for an astonishing variety of purposes. DYNELEY HUSSEY.
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