The Metropolitan Opera’s radio broadcast season begins this Saturday, December 2, with a work by a great opera composer that is not, technically, an opera: Verdi’s Requiem. The performance will be dedicated to the memory of baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, who passed away on November 22 at the age of 55. 

There are two people who earned the distinction of being the “glories of Italy” in Giuseppe Verdi’s eyes, both of whom are memorialized in the Requiem: Gioachino Rossini and Alessandro Manzoni. Rossini, who had died 5 years before Manzoni, already had Verdi contemplating a Requiem Mass. At the time of Rossini’s death Verdi and several other composers attempted to write a mass. However, after many logistical issues, it never came to fruition.

Alessandro Manzoni was to Italy what Goethe was to Germany. A brilliant novelist and poet, he was a symbol for the Italian unification, and his novel The Betrothed is ranked as a masterpiece of world literature.  Verdi read this novel as a young man and it remained his favorite novel for his entire life. Manzoni was a personal hero to Verdi, and they both were figures in the push for Italian independence and unification. Verdi’s wife met Manzoni and brought Verdi a signed photograph on which Manzoni wrote “to Giuseppe Verdi, a glory of Italy, from a decrepit Lombard writer”.  In 1868, when the two finally met for the first time, Verdi was truly star struck. Verdi, in a letter to Countess Claina Maffei, said “I would have knelt before him, if men could be worshipped.”  

When Manzoni passed on May 22, 1873, Verdi was so deeply affected that he could not bring himself to attend the funeral. Instead, he visited his hero’s grave alone and unseen. Verdi was not just in Milan to visit Manzoni’s grave; he was also there to propose his new work, the Requiem Mass, to the city. The proposal was accepted and a performance planned. In a letter to the Mayor of Milan, Verdi assured him that the Requiem would be worthy of the country and “of the Man whose loss we all mourn”.

His work would require a massive orchestra and choir as well as four soloists. Verdi already had a Libera me written for the failed Rossini mass, and he revised the movement for his new Requiem Mass. The largest section of the mass is the ten part Dies Irae. Themes from the Dies Irae keep reappearing all the way until the end of the piece where it merges with the themes from the start of the Requiem. The end result has been perhaps the most performed major choral work aside from the completed Mozart Requiem. It is a score with all the markings of a Verdi opera while still being a non theatrical piece. Even Hans von Bülow, a German conductor and critic who had a disdain for all non-German music, was moved to tears upon hearing the Requiem.

It is truly a masterwork, and in the hands of James Levine and the Met Orchestra and Chorus, it will be nothing short of spectacular.  This is the first time since 2008 that the Verdi Requiem will be on the stage at the Met. The soloists for the performance will be soprano Krassimira Stoyanova, mezzo Ekaterina Semenchuk, tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko, and the Italian bass Ferruccio Furlanetto. The piece runs about an hour and a half without intermission.  I hope you join me in listening on Saturday, December 2 at 1:00 p.m. on WHRO-FM.

You can find more details about the production at the Met’s website.