Requiem
- Ether | Scenic oratorioI
In a unique staged oratorio project, the ethereal music of Gabriel Fauré performed by the choir, orchestra and soloists is joined by ballet, light, the stage, and the scent of sacred wood. The set and hall will be permeated with a mystical atmosphere that will be like a meditation, a prelude to the upcoming holidays at the end of October and the beginning of November when the day shortens and twilight descends on the earth - when we remember our dead and face the thought of our transience -Memento Mori.
Fauré's Requiem, one of the most optimistic in European oratorio literature, leads us in its dramaturgical arc from Death to Life and towards Paradisum. We will add some of the most beautiful pieces of Fauré's compositional oeuvre to the music of the Requiem, which will complete the story of Life and Death, the journey of the soul, which finally sinks into eternal light. Life goes undisturbed despite the daily death drama as if nothing had happened. Maybe it didn't, and it's all part of the great cycle we call Life.
The French composer Gabriel Fauré has strung together the most beautiful melodies he has ever created in his seven-movement work of art. The creation of Requiem was almost certainly a musical tribute to his father, who died in 1885, three years before it began to be composed. Traditionally, a requiem is a prayerful lament for the dead. Still, Fauré's Requiem is entirely different, as the composer, unlike many of his contemporaries, had no explicit religious beliefs. However, he worked as a church organist for the first 25 years of his professional career. In a 1902 interview, he says: "People have said that [the Requiem] does not express the horror of death; someone has called it a death lullaby. But this is how I feel death: as a happy liberation, a longing for the happiness of the afterlife, and not as a sad passage." Of the seven movements, "Pie Jesu", "Agnus Dei", and "In Paradisum" stand out as the most magnificent, which are full of rich, spiritual melodies. Many composers, including Camille Saint-Saëns, also praised the work who found it divine. The first version of the Requiem was performed in 1888 and served with a full orchestra at Fauré's funeral in 1924.
Fauré's musical language combines the clarity and poise of the great French masters of the 18th century, Couperin, Rameau, Lully and others. Fauré's approaches to harmony and musical colour were forward-looking, with gentle dissonances and sometimes unexpected chords, foreshadowed by the impressionism of Debussy and Ravel.