Songs for Today: Dies Irae

The Dies Irae is a sequence of the traditional Catholic Requiem mass. I expect to return to mass music, and especially Requiem masses, because of the richness of the Western canon in this area. Most great composers wrote several masses, but few have written more than one serious Requiem. Like the symphony after Beethoven, but to an even greater extent, the Requiem has become a powerful, singular statement by a composer. It's a massive undertaking, typically utilizing combined choirs, orchestra, and soloists. One does not simply write a Requiem mass. The composer of a Requiem looks death in the eye. Worse, he stands astride centuries of the greatest music ever written. His audience will know those that have gone before. Thus, it takes some substantial figurative balls to put notes on the staff under the title Requiem. This issue will be addressed further in The Burden of Culture, Part II (forthcoming).

The basic Requiem text is more or less agreed, although its use in music has fluctuated somewhat according to the direction of the church and the conscience of the composer. Composers divide up the Requiem mass differently. Sometimes modern texts supplement or replace all or part of the traditional text; a trend started by two of the all-time greats, Johannes Brahms (Ein Deutsches Requiem) and Robert Schumann (Requiem fuer Mignon, oddly, a requiem in honor of the death of a fictional character). Whatever the final text, the composer of a Requiem is expected to base their work on a musical exegesis of the spiritual themes of the original, and to integrate the ancient musical themes which are closely associated with them. These necessary similarities and the extraordinarily high quality of composition make Requiem masses an excellent point of comparison between composers, especially with regard to comparable segments of text.

The Dies Irae is one of the most enduring movements of Requiem masses. It's often included even where other texts have also interceded.  This is presumably because the Dies Irae is FREAKING AWESOME. (If you disagree on this point, either 1. you've never heard it; or 2. we probably can't be friends.) It's essentially a condensed book of Revelations, focusing on the final Judgment. Musically, it is closely associated with a 13th century Gregorian plainchant hymn. Later composers, particularly after Mozart, have cranked up the terror on "day of wrath," hitting the opening of the movement with everything they've got. Following the opening tumult, the composer backs off into a more contemplative mood to consider the implications of Judgment. Resurgent fear often intervenes, either in the course of the initial Dies Irae, or in a subsequent Libera Me movement.

Because of its ancient pedigree and ability to be easily recognized, the Dies Irae theme has been borrowed in other contexts by a number of composers to evoke the fear of death and judgment, and the broader theme of death in general. As a musical tool of communication, there is probably no easier way to place these themes in the mind of the listener. When you hear the Dies Irae, shit gets real. In just two bars, the listener is reminded of the coming Judgment. This is sometimes controversial when the Dies Irae is placed in irreverent contexts, as we shall see.

Below I've embedded some notable implementations of the Dies Irae. If you know of others in popular culture, please post them to the comments.

Composer unkown, Dies Irae, plainchant hymn, 13th Century

The original Gregorian chant is the musical root from which the others have grown.

Wolfgang Mozart, Dies Irae, from Requiem, 1791.

Mozart's Requiem was unfinished at his death. According to the Pedia,  the vocal and basso continuo lines of the Dies Irae were complete, but the remainder of the orchestration was supplied by later composers based on his implications. Mozart gave us enough raw material to work out an utterly frightening day of wrath.

Giuseppe Verdi, Dies Irae, from Messa da Requiem, 1874.

Verdi was primarily a composer of operas, and it shows. The work is well-balanced vocally, but, gloriously, he asks for more out of the strings than any reasonable person would. The result is something like an explosion followed by a desperate search through the rubble.

Benjamin Britten, Dies Irae, from War Requiem, 1962

This is a crappy recording, but you can get the gist of it. Britten's War Requiem is a reflection on the horrors of World War II, written for the recommissioning of a 14th century cathedral destroyed by the Luftwaffe. Britten went to America before World War II, but returned to Britain in 1942. He was a conscientious objector, and he had a few things to tell us about the war. Indeed, the Dies Irae comes up several times in his Requiem, in different forms. The War Requiem uses both traditional texts and modern poetry.

Some other top-notch examples of a classical Dies Irae are found in Dvorak's and Bruckner's Requiems.

Hector Berlioz, Symphony Fantastique, Movement V: Songe d'une nuit de sabbat (1830).

One of the most famous uses of the Dies Irae is not in a Requiem at all. Hector Berlioz scandalized early 19th-century Parisian audiences by putting the Dies Irae in a programmatic romantic work:  a movement of a fantastic (read: like fantasy) symphony, the song of a witch's sabbath following the execution of his beloved in the 4th movement. Truly this is a day of wrath, wrought in pestilence and perversion. It is a mockery of the Requiem; an audacious and haughty rejection of the dignity of its truth. Here is a new fear: what can man do against such reckless hate? But it is also a work of musical genius.  The Dies Irae theme is introduced by funeral bells after 2'30" (but do listen all the way through!).  It is raised again after 6', where it ultimately succumbs and merges into the triumphant revelry. I don't like Ozawa's interpretation of this piece in general (far too fast, for starters), but the funeral bells are spot on, and the vinyl just sounds right.


Honorable Mentions:

• Berlioz (Dies Irae, Grande Messe des Morts)
• Dvorak
• Bruckner
• Penderecki
• Liszt ("Tottentanz")
• Rachmaninoff (Variations on a Theme by Paganini, variation X)

See also:
>Rice & Webber (Requiem for Evita, from the musical Evita)
>Larson (La Vie Boheme, from the musical Rent)