Requiem in D Minor

Fauré almost certainly composed his Messe de Requiem for a memorial service held in January 1888 at the Parisian church of La Madeleine. Its original version comprised five sections of the Latin Mass for the Dead, including a sublime setting of “Pie Jesu” for solo soprano and organ and the exquisite “In Paradisum”, among the most beautiful of all late-19th-century sacred compositions. What he called his “Little Requiem” is scored for the strikingly effective combination of violas, cellos, double basses, organ, harp and timpani, with a solo violin making an appearance in the “Sanctus”. Fauré introduced two trumpets and two horns to the mix for a second performance at La Madeleine in May 1888 and subsequently extended the work with the “Hostias” and “Libera me” for solo baritone and the meditative choral opening and closing sections of the “Offertory”. Fauré recalled how he had intended to “do something different” with his Requiem. He did so by axing the traditional “Dies irae”, with its emphasis on hellfire and damnation, to create what one early critic, much to the composer’s liking, described as “a cradle song of death”. The music’s gentle lyricism draws the listener deep into the text while accentuating occasional outpourings of emotion, notably so in the great choral shouts of “Osanna” and the impassioned central section of the “Agnus Dei”. Under pressure from his publisher, Fauré agreed to enlarge his Requiem’s orchestration. The symphonic version, first performed during the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1900, achieved global popularity; its more sophisticated, more intimate predecessors, however, were restored to life, first in an edition prepared by John Rutter in the early 1980s and since by painstaking textual scholarship.