Tomorrow my wife and I are going to see a performance of Mozart's Requiem.
I rarely (as in almost never) go to classical music events, although I very much recently enjoyed an "opera" performance, "No Prisoner Be" at the Richardson Theater in Princeton performed by the opera singer Joyce Didonato.
We got free front row seats from a friend, who'd received them from a neighbor. He gave them to us because he told me he'd "rather be stabbed in the eye than attend an opera."
It was very moving and we were grateful to see it.
The Requiem, Mozart's last work, the writing of which was theme of the play/movie "Amadeus" with Tom Hulce, was apparently unfinished at the time of his death and another composer tried to steal it, while a third composer finished it. This is what I learned of it on line, anyway.
The only exposure to requiems I've had was reading Joseph Bor's Terezin Requiem . It's about the performance by Jewish prisoners of Verdi's requiem in the Terezin concentration camp during the Holocaust. I recommended the book to my marriage therapist, who saved my marriage when it was young. She borrowed it from me, was very moved, and invited my wife and I to a operatic concert at the Hollywood Bowl, which we attended, but which I don't remember. I don't think it was Verdi's requiem, though.
About the book, Bor's Terezin Requiem:
In the summer of 1944, as the German army begins to suffer shattering defeats, Adolf Eichmann converts the Terezín ghetto, in central Europe, into a disguised assembly camp for the newly constructed Birkenau extermination camp. Among the Jews at Terezín is Raphael Schachter, a brilliant young conductor who decides to embark on a study of the Giuseppe Verdi Requiem. Schachter is attracted to the project by the incredible availability of talent at Terezín, where the Nazis have assembled thousands of artists to promote the image of Hitler’s “model” camp. He is also drawn to the Requiem as a prayer for the dead that may comfort the prisoners of the concentration camp and help him answer profound questions about the meaning of life and death for Jews under Nazi rule.
Coached by a half-deaf, old beggar (who later turns out to be a musical genius), Schachter begins to assemble his choir and soloists. Chief among them are Francis, a cantor from Galacia who sings tenor; Maruska, a delicate soprano who has witnessed unspeakable Nazi atrocities; and Elizabeth, a famous mezzo-soprano whose crippled husband is the choir’s first audience.
Because the Nazis are concealing the actual purpose of Terezín, they lead Schachter and his musicians to believe that they will be secure there. Nazi officials provide sheet music and instruments, confiscated from Jews all over Europe. They remove all the inhabitants of the local hospital and turn it into a rehearsal hall. They reassure all the musicians that they will not be separated. The performers rejoice in the hope that they will be spared the fate of their fellow Jews in the camps.
This confidence is shattered when the injured and disabled who have been evacuated from the hospital are taken away, and their relatives in the choir follow them to their doom. Schachter must start assembling musicians all over again. New soloists miraculously appear, including Roderich, the son of a Jewish father and a Roman Catholic mother who unknowingly sent him to Terezín for his own protection when the German army drafted him...
My sister-in-law suggested we go with her and her husband to this one, Mozart's Requiem, in New Jersey, and well, it's never too late to try something new. (That is one of the things I have loved about my wife; her thrill at doing "something new." ) Since I thought I might be dying, although my impending death was put on hold apparently, I jumped at the chance to see Mozart's requiem.
I'm looking forward to it, I really am.
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Close your eyes, absorb the experience…it’s awesome music.
Wish I was there.. hug..
