Mozart’s Requiem translates the concrete reality of the Christian virtue of hope for doubters and believers alike, says Communion and Liberation member John Kinder. Beauty can wound the heart, and open it up to the presence of something divine.
By Anthony Barich
Such is the case with Mozart’s Requiem, according to John Kinder, a Professor of Italian at the University of Western Australia who also leads two discussion groups in Perth’s western suburbs following the charism of the late Italian Fr Luigi Giussani – one in Claremont and one at UWA.
Fr Giussani, a close friend of Pope Benedict XVI, founded Communion and Liberation in 1954 when he established a Christian presence in Berchet high school in Milan with a group called Gioventù Studentesca (Student Youth), GS for short.
The current name of the movement, Communion and Liberation (CL), appeared for the first time in 1969.
It synthesises the conviction that the Christian event, lived in communion, is the foundation of the authentic liberation of man and is today present in about 70 countries throughout the world.
There is no type of membership card, only the free participation of persons. The basic instrument for the formation of adherents is weekly catechesis, called “School of Community.”
Today, CL’s members – many of them university students based mostly in Italy – are among the most passionate supporters of Pope Benedict XVI, who has often championed the link between faith and reason.
While still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict used the term ‘Wounded by beauty’ in 2002 when speaking at the CL cultural festival in Rimini known as the ‘Meeting for Friendship among the Peoples’.
Ratzinger said: “In a platonic sense, we could say that the arrow of nostalgia pierces man, wounds him and in this way gives him wings, lifts him upwards towards the transcendent. True knowledge is being struck by the arrow of Beauty that wounds man, moved by reality.”
Later, he spoke of the wounding power of beauty as a means of opening his eyes to reality when, having experienced a Bach concert in Munich sitting next to a Lutheran bishop, the two looked at each other and said, “Anyone who has heard this, knows that the faith is true”.
But, “if faith is only based on a book (the Bible), we’re in trouble,” says Prof. Kinder.
“Belief is best experienced not just by agreeing to things that are found in the Gospel, but we believe because we have verified them in my our own life.”
Fr Julián Carrón, Giussani’s successor as leader of CL, said that faith is not about things unseen, but about things we can see; our own experience and reality. We just need to be able to see them for what they really are, Prof. Kinder says.
Faith is a way of knowing, a way to truly see the reality we are immersed in. The light of faith clarifies things. When seen in the light of The Resurrection, faith is certainty in the present; hope is certainty in the future.
It’s about taking the Incarnation seriously – the concept that, in a very real way, God ‘got his hands dirty’ by lowering Himself to share our humanity. Therefore, the presence of the Divine is here and now. Christ came on earth and remained with us, as He promised He would. Faith is recognising the presence in our reality, with certainty.
The deep longing within each of us responds to beauty, to Christ, if only we let it.
At Giussani’s funeral in 2005, Ratzinger described his friend’s search thus: “Fr Giussani grew up in a home – as he himself said – poor as far as bread was concerned, but rich in music, and thus from the start he was touched, or better, wounded, by the desire for beauty. He was not satisfied with any beauty whatever, a banal beauty. He sought Beauty itself, infinite beauty, and thus he found Christ; in Christ he found true beauty, the path of life, the true joy…”
Mozart’s Requiem displays a determined courage to hope because of the evidence of our reality that reveals God.
It is not a sorrowful event. It is a determined, confident request, with full belief in the resurrection, embraced in the mercy of God that he knows for a fact is there.
It brings a whole new light to the very notion of prayer.
It’s natural, Prof. Kinder says, to be certain about the future if we’re certain about the present.
Music, or everything that is beautiful in this world depending on the individual’s tastes, awakens something within us. When a person feels this, Fr Giussani says, his soul immediately harkens to await ‘the other thing’. Even in the presence of what he can grasp, he awaits ‘another thing’ – an infinite being that is true beauty – God.
Mozart’s Requiem, then, is a reflection on life and the human condition, on this certainty of God’s love.
Prof. Kinder addressed a group of over 100 on May 18 at St Thomas the Apostle parish, Claremont on this subject, based on reflections by Fr Giussani contained in the booklet of a CD reissued in 1998 in the Spirto Gentil series.
A Requiem is a reflection on death, which is itself a reflection on life – a provocation to ask what we think death is and therefore what we think life is all about. The way one looks at death shapes the way one looks at life.
Christ said that He was the way, the truth and the life – in short, the answer. But what is the question? The question is what all humans yearn for, as Fr Giussani says – happiness, truth, justice, beauty and love – questions that are written in the heart of man, our deepest awareness of ourselves and all reality.
Try as we may, we are structurally incapable of answering these questions. God – the answer – is forgotten.
“We need an intervention from outside ourselves. I need something other than myself to break through, to puncture the horizons of my being in order to show me and to give me the answer to these urgings of my heart,” Prof. Kinder said.
“Too often we speak of God, Jesus, the Church, without remembering that these words can be empty if they do not rise up in us out of a recognition of ‘what is the question’, the question that Jesus claims to be the answer to.”
Mozart’s Requiem asks such questions, forcefully. It is written for a symphonic orchestra, a large chorus and four soloists. The orchestra is reduced, with fewer instruments than most of Mozart’s other large-scale works. All the attention is on the chorus and the soloists, and therefore on the words.
Mozart grouped the various prayers of the Mass for the Dead into five sections. As the first combines the entrance prayer and the Kyrie, the Requiem opens in peace and calm. We first hear one instrument, then another and another and finally the chorus sings the opening prayer. The mood is one of profound meditation on the dramatic nature of human existence – a drama that suddenly breaks into a cry to God:
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine;
et lux perpetua luceat eis.
Eternal rest grant them, O Lord;
and let light perpetual shine upon them.
When we have a Mass for a loved one who has died, we often focus these days on “thanksgiving for the life of the person” or “celebration of the life of the person”. But this was not always the case. In earlier times, the funeral Mass was primarily about asking – asking for meaning, for life, for an embrace of wholeness.
The opening statement of Mozart’s music is a statement of begging: “Give them rest, grant them light”, begging for that “external intervention”, that action from outside ourselves, something that will show us the meaning of our lives and our deaths and something that will show us the way to reach that meaning. This is not a cry of desperation, but a clear and firm request, pronounced word by word “et lux perpetua”.
After a very brief statement of praise from the solo soprano, the full chorus resumes a forceful repeat of the request: “hear my prayer”.
This moves immediately into the Kyrie, the great cry for mercy. Mercy for what? Fr Giussani writes: “Mozart presents in his Requiem man’s evil, the world’s hate, and sin’s malice within the reverberations of the mercy of God. On one hand he leads us with his music into the tremendous choice of the man who refuses God. The word that best expresses this refusal is forgetting; it refers to an experience that adults have. A child is attentive, but when an adult withdraws his attention from something, it is deliberate. So forgetting is refusal.”
Our deepest forgetting, he says, is the most obvious and most profound thing that one can know about oneself: that “I do not owe my existence to myself. I did not give myself my life, but I exist because some mysterious Other, outside myself, has given my being and is holding me in being in every instant. The deepest self-awareness I can come to is that ‘I am You who make me’,” Prof. Kinder said.
Fr Giussani also wrote: “The world’s injustice is a forgetting of God, injustice in your life and my life is the forgetting of God, this is the “crime” from which all other crimes derive.”
The “Kyrie” is a plea for mercy for this forgetting. This ancient prayer, Prof. Kinder said, is given majestic setting in a monumental fugue, in which the four voices of the chorus take turns in singing the tune on the two phrases “Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison”. Round and round goes the music until the chorus unites in a final “Kyrie eleison”.
The music is strong, vibrant, confident, and ends with chorus and orchestra at full volume, in a strong open chord with beating drum.
“This is no meek plea, made out of fear or hopeless guilt. This is a question that demands an answer, the cry of a beggar who demands to be heard, a question made in the certainty that it will be heard and answered,” Prof. Kinder said.
This intensity leads directly into the second section of the Requiem, the “Sequence”, a medieval poem that was always included in the Catholic funeral Mass until the 1960s.
It uses biblical images of judgement in a powerful meditation on the Last Judgement, consisting of 17 verses of just three lines each. Mozart divides it into six parts, each with its own distinct feel, reflecting the meaning of the words.
The opening “Dies Irae” section announces the awesome greatness of the Lord who will judge all creation, in a short piece of relentless energy. The “Tuba mirum” has four soloists, all of whom have moments when they are heard clearly and distinctly but are soon brought back into an ensemble. This very structure reflects a deep theology of man, Prof. Kinder says.
“We could think of the soloists as a kind of mini-chorus, as opposed to the general chorus. The Requiem is a reflection on our common destiny. It is all ensemble, collective expression. The destiny being reflected on here, is ours, it is for all of us, none of us can escape the mortal condition the work puts before us. We are in it together,” he said.
The soloists are heard in turn, from lowest to highest. The Bass sings of the trumpet summoning all creation to judgement and the Tenor describes the book containing all things being opened. The Alto presents the figure of the judge, and the Soprano introduces the theme of humanity in its immense misery. Then all four come together to repeat the last line twice, in a statement of human smallness in the face of Infinite Being.
The “Rex tremendae” section presents the figure of the Eternal Judge. The word “Rex” (King) is repeated three times by the chorus, at full volume, and then the first two lines are sung over a few times. But then, “in contrast to the unbridgeable distance that separates us from the eternal King of the world, comes the unexpected sweetness of the invocation ‘Save me, oh fount of mercy’”. First the female voices, then the male voices and then whole chorus “ends humbly in an embrace already foreshadowed in the sweet final notes”.
In the long fourth section “Recordare”, the chorus implores Christ directly, reminding Him that He entered human history to save all people. One verse introduces the theme of hope: “You who absolved Mary (Magdalen), and granted the thief’s request, to me also have you given hope.”
The quietly certain music underlines that this hope is sure and has good grounds, Prof. Kinder says.
“(The music says) I believe in faith that Jesus showed mercy to, among others, Mary Magdalen and the good thief and this gives me grounds for hope in mercy being shown to me. This understanding of hope speaks to us modern people, in our hope-poor postmodern world. We need a hope that the Holy Father has called ‘realistic’ (Spe Salvi: 30) and Fr Giussani called ‘reasonable’ (Is It Possible to Live This Way, Volume 2: Hope). Where might such a hope come from?
Fr Giussani describes faith as the recognition of a presence, which allows man to experience the answer to the yearnings of his heart, which can only be something of divine origin. The experience of this presence is the foundation of hope.
One’s hope is realistic and can be certain, as Pope Benedict says, if it is grounded in a present certainty.
The music returns, in the “Confutatis maledictis” section, to the contemplation of evil, and the judgement that will defeat it.
The theme “The damned will be condemned and thrown into harsh flames” is sung imperiously by the male voices, with a whirling rhythm in the orchestra. Then in the third line, we immediately hear, again, the entreaty, the begging, entrusted to the female voices: “Call me among the blessed”. The entire chorus then joins together in prayer “I beg you, prostrate and imploring” – this is in the gesture of hope grounded in faith.
The final “Lacrimosa” section was added some time after the rest of the poem was established. Amid tears, expressed through the sobbing rhythm of the chorus and orchestra, the sinner will hear the judgement as he rises from the flames.
A surprise is in store in the final two lines. The entire poem has so far expressed the perspective of the individual, “save me”, “call me”. Now in a gesture of boundless charity, the gaze moves out to embrace all the dead, all humanity, with whom we share a common destiny, Prof. Kinder says: “Merciful Lord Jesus, grant them rest. The final ‘Amen’ is delivered with conviction, in the certainty that the questions in my heart arise because they have an answer.”
The Communion prayer, the final prayer of the Requiem Mass, echoes the words of the Entrance Prayer. Mozart has underlined this by using the same music from the Entrance and the Kyrie, creating a mighty frame to the entire work, which opens and closes with the theme of begging and mercy.
Soprano and chorus repeat the entreaty “Eternal rest grant to them, O Lord; and let perpetual light shine upon them, O Lord”. The final two lines are miraculous in the way the music and words combine. The line “with your saints forever” is set to the same mighty fugue as the opening Kyrie, and as we hear this phrase repeated over thirty times through the chorus, we know that this is the basis of our hope: our conviction that the saints are already in the presence of God, this gives us the certainty to make the final statement.
And the final statement is delivered with force in a majestic final affirmation of the victory of mercy over evil: “for you are merciful”.
The work thus ends not with a statement about death, about us, about our sinfulness, our unworthiness, Prof. Kinder says. It ends with a statement about the source of our being, the God who made us, who holds us in being and restores us to fullness through his gratuitous gaze of mercy. This statement is based on faith, the lived experience of encounter with Christ, and because it is based on faith, it is a statement of certain hope.
That is why Mozart’s Requiem is, ultimately, a statement of hope.