One of the many odd features of this glorious score of Faure’s is the prominence of the viola players. Usually in pieces like this it’s the violins who rule the roost, with the violas meekly supplying the middle voice. But not in Faure’s famous Requiem. A violin player has to wait for half the piece to pass before she even has a chance to play. No, it’s the violas who rule the top line in this piece. To get a sense of how good this must feel for the viola section, just Google the keywords “lame viola joke.” You’ll have hundreds to choose from, pretty much along the lines of this:
Question: What’s the difference between a viola and a violin?
Answer: you can tune a violin.
You get the idea. But as you have heard, these violas are wonderfully in tune. Nothing meek about them. And as this morning’s gospel assures us, blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the score.
There are other odd features of this piece. It is said that Faure started writing following the deaths of both his parents, but pretty much all he produced in that year was the Libera me, the section you heard just before the Gospel. It wasn’t until 1888 that he completed five movements, and it was four more years before he had seven. But nothing was published until 1900, and that score was so riddled with printer’s errors and oversights that it’s driven editors crazy ever since. It’s as if Faure really couldn’t figure out precisely what he wanted. And the fact is that the piece wasn’t performed all that often in Faure’s lifetime. It was only in the 1920s that it seemed to catch on with the French listening public. And the rest, of course, is history, as your presence today testifies.
I will come back to that delayed popularity in a moment. But I should note what is perhaps the oddest thing about this piece, at least as ordinary requiems go. As Christian Clough explained in his on-line essay, most big nineteenth-century Requiems, like Verdi’s or Bruckner’s, featured a crash bang setting of the Dies Irae, “Day of wrath, Day of Terror,” that ancient feature of the Roman funeral rite that was meant to scare the daylights out of those who mourn, setting them back on the track of righteousness with pounding tympanies, clanging brass and stentorian choruses. There’s almost nothing like that in Faure’s Requiem. All is serenity, lush harmonies in low registers, the plangent singing of a soprano soloist, the peaceful obbligato of a solo violin. That peace is broken only once, at bar 53 of the Libera me–do you remember?– when out of nowhere brass and chorus launch into a deafening Dies Irae. The world of righteous judgment breaks in when one least expects it. But not for long. By bar 70, all is quiet again, as if the Day of Wrath never happened, as if the composer intentionally liberates us from fear.
No one can really explain why Faure’s piece took so long to catch on in France and elsewhere–published in 1900, but not performed regularly until at least 20 years later. But I have a theory about this history of delayed performance. Those 20 years in France and elsewhere in Europe were punctuated by unspeakable carnage and pestilence, with millions dead in a savage war and millions more dead in the great flu epidemic. No wonder people clamored for the serenity and harmony of this great piece, for the consolation of a paradise imagined and restored, in the company of all the saints. What would it have been like to hear this requiem for the first time, with the memory still fresh of all those deaths, at whose graves on days like All Souls those who survived repeated the ancient refrain: “Libera me! “Deliver me, from the injustice of violence and an early death.”
Which brings me at last to Matthew’s gospel on this mash-up of All Saints, All Souls morning, In a sense, the Beatitudes have their own kind of performance history in liturgies like this. Like Faure’s Requiem, the Beatitudes have offered generations of believers a gospel of consolation. Blessed are the poor in spirit, Blessed are the meek, Blessed are those who mourn.
But there’s an edge to this consolation in Matthew. Matthew’s gospel was likely written for a community of believers still reeling from the blood and smoke of the first Jewish revolt in the year 70. The Roman juggernaut all but leveled Jerusalem, demolishing the Temple and the Temple Mount sacred to both Jews and Jewish Christians. So there’s an edge to it when Matthew has Jesus bless those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, or bless those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake. Righteousness is one of Matthew’s favorite words. Protestant Christians especially prone to interpret this righteousness in an individualistic way, where the thirst for righteousness amounts to a thirst for personal salvation, a hunger, to use the evangelical catchphrase, to get right with God.
But just think of the difference it would make if we translated the word Matthew uses not as righteousness but as justice: Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice! Blessed are those who are persecuted for justice’s sake, persecuted because they thirst for justice–thirst for a more just world for the poor in spirit, the weak, for those who mourn, for every victim of violence, neglect, oppression and avoidable pestilence. Matthew’s call to righteousness is meant to call us up short, like a Dies Irae in the middle of a Libera me: it is a cry for justice as the means and sign of liberation from oppression.
What would it mean if we read Matthew’s gospel this way and then responded accordingly, seeking not the delayed consolation of a future life but a just future for our neighbors in this one? Ours too, after all, is a time of pestilence and war. As the Ebola epidemic rages among the poorest of the poor, who will step forward as the merciful ones? And as violence and carnage once again threaten to consume the Temple Mount, who will risk support for the peacemakers? What would it take for us to be counted among the blessed, to be admitted to the company of those saints who have gone before us, to be faithful to those who will inherit the world we have created?
On this All Saints Day, on this feast of All Souls, we remember the dead, we pray for the dead, consoled by the beauty of this requiem. But in the spirit of this gospel, regard that consolation not as an end, but as a beginning. Seize the blessing. To paraphrase the advice of that great secular saint, Mother Jones: Pray for the dead, but then go out from this place, and fight like hell for the living.
–The Rev. Dr. Roger A. Ferlo
Church of St. Paul & the Redeemer
November 2, 2014