Mozart's Requiem captures all the highs and lows of a pandemic year, masks and all
Vancouver Bach Choir returns to live performance with a piece that offers beauty and hope amid the darkness
Leslie Dala conducts a masked choir—and reports the sound still brings the necessary power to Mozart’s Requiem. Photos by Diamonds Edge
Vancouver Bach Choir presents Mozart’s Requiem on October 23 at 7:30 pm at the Orpheum. All ticket holders to the concert will receive access to a video recording of the concert sent by email on November 5; tickets are also available for virtual access only.
THANKS TO DIRECTOR Miloš Forman’s indelible Amadeus, much of the world forever links Wolfgang Amadeus’s Requiem in D minor with the “Lacrimosa” section that closes the movie. The darkly cathartic climax of voices and orchestra accompanies the composer’s rain-soaked burial in a mass grave—an end shockingly unbefitting of a musical genius.
But there are many, many more moods to Mozart’s epic choral mass. And it’s that complexity of emotions—the solemn, the soothing, the meditative, the melancholy—that makes it a perfect soundtrack to these ongoing pandemic times.
“It’s a piece that expresses everything that we as human beings experience,” explains maestro Leslie Dala, who’ll oversee the return of the Vancouver Bach Choir to live performance with the piece. “One of the things that’s been really difficult is people feel a tremendous sense of loss—loss of friends or family members, but also a sense of loss in connection, a feeling of being alone. There’s that general grief. And just looking at the climate this summer: for a lot of people that hit home in a way it didn’t before. So there’s this general dread and anxiety. And this piece speaks to all of that.”
The loss of connection and anxiety are feelings that have spread through a choral scene hit hard by pandemic restrictions. And there’s something of rising up to the challenge of Mozart’s final masterpiece that speaks to the ensemble’s resilience.
When they sing the Requiem this weekend at the Orpheum, 65 choir members will spread out, masked, accompanied by equally spread-out Vancouver Opera Orchestra players. And Dala says you may be surprised to hear how full the sound in the Orpheum is despite the masks. “With the thinner masks, it’s possible to get that beautiful sound, and to project,” he offers, admitting the singers have to put in extra work toward diction. “It retains a lot of that power for the audience.”
It helps, the conductor says, that the Requiem is part of the choir’s DNA. The Bach Choir has performed it often over its 91-year history—not that the maestro doesn’t find new shades in it each time.
The work, after all, remains shrouded in mystery. In the fictionalized Amadeus, we see Salieri—Mozart’s jealous rival—helping write the Requiem at the composer’s bedside, as Mozart lies dying and delirious, dictating the music. And it’s true that the 35-year-old Mozart died tragically, in 1791, before finishing the masterpiece. (Even what killed him has been a source of contention, with initial rumours of poisoning and modern theories ranging from simple strep to miliary fever.) But it is now widely believed that it was completed by the composer’s student Franz Xaver Süssmayr—hired by Mozart’s wife, Costanze, who was desperate to keep the commission money. Never mind that Salieri wasn’t even his enemy.
There is still confusion about how much Mozart wrote, and how much Süssmayr conceived from his mentor’s drafts. And Dala, who has been immersed in HC Robbins Landon’s book Mozart: His Life and Work, has discovered the composer was possibly not so delirious, and not so preoccupied with his impending death when he wrote the Requiem (which is often considered a mass written to mark his own demise).
“When you look at actual letters and manuscripts, apparently the writing was in such a clear hand,” Dala shares. “His illness came on quite suddenly. He was actually in a very positive state of mind.”
Dala is equally fascinated with the musical discoveries that lie within the piece. On one hand it’s based on liturgy that predated the composer by a thousand or more years; the Requiem Mass’s origins date back to the first millennium and the birth of Gregorian chants in churches. But Dala also marvels at the influences of Baroque master Johann Sebastian Bach, whom Mozart discovered later in life. Just listen to the stormy musical lines of the “Dies Irae” section: “Most of the movements are contrapuntal in the Requiem,” Dala points out.
Mozart’s operas are Dala’s “desert-island” music, and he loves the same journey of emotions that the uniquely gifted composer conjured in the Requiem.
“You turn one page and it turns into something else,” the conductor says. “There’s all the beauty that people expect of Mozart—movements of divine beauty. And then some of it feels a bit like the weather today: dark and dreary!”
And so it is that the choir, along with soloists—soprano Robyn Driedger-Klassen, mezzo Katie Fernandez, tenor Scott Rumble, and bass Neil Craighead—will visit some foreboding musical places in their season-opening performance on the weekend. But a bit like the world right now, they’ll also reach for hope again—and rise above the inconveniences of masks and social distancing.
“Right now we’re just so happy that we can move forward with this,” Dala says. “Artists over the centuries have found ways to work with challenges, so it’s important to us that it’s a very small price to pay. Recordings are great and video concerts are great but in a room, the connection that happens: you can’t quantify that.”
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