“Should not church music be mostly for the heart?” —Joseph Martin Kraus The Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead—the Requiem, sometimes called Missa pro Defunctis (or Defuncto) or Messe des Morts—is surely the most dramatic of liturgical forms and has inspired countless composers, from medieval times to the present. What the Czech composer Antonin Dvořák, a devout [...]
Here are ten outstanding Christmas-themed classical pieces, including both the well-known and the little-known. 1. G.F. Handel: Messiah Though especially popular at Christmas time, it is only “Part the First” of Handel's Messiah that pertains to the season—the latter two sections address Christ’s passion and resurrection. There are some 100 versions of this magisterial work currently [...]
Hector Berlioz was a professed atheist, but could anything as tender and touching as "L’Enfance du Christ" have been written by a man who did not believe? And what of Berlioz’s closing line to the work: “Oh my soul, what remains for you to do but shatter your pride before so great a mystery?" The [...]
Great music pierces the soul… and can sometimes terrify it. Over the centuries, composers, like nearly all artists of every variety, have been fascinated by the subject of death and by the supernatural—the world of witches, goblins, ghosts, and demons. Composers have given us Dances of the Dead, frightful tone poems and songs, scary opera [...]
Hector Berlioz brightened the world with his art. He marched to the beat of his own drum—sometimes literally. My binge on Berlioz has made me warm to the composer. And I am readier, I think, to accept him on his own terms. Many years ago, a reader introduced himself to me outside the Metropolitan Opera [...]
Although he wrote a Requiem Mass, Te Deum, and other spiritual compositions, the French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz has regularly received brickbats from Catholic listeners. In The Catholic Encyclopedia (1907), the Dutch-American organist and choirmaster Joseph Otten decried the Berlioz Requiem as a “sacred work, but it does not express any deep personal faith from Berlioz himself... [...]
Though Handel's "Messiah" rightly reigns supreme as the king of music for Easter, there are many other seasonal masterpieces that deserve to be heard more often. Here are ten lesser-known classical works that brilliantly depict the dramatic events of Holy Week and Easter Sunday. 1. "Resurrexit" from the Messe Solennelle, by Hector Berlioz (1824) The [...]
"They are finally going to play my music." —Hector Berlioz, on his deathbed Though Hector Berlioz's operas are still little known today—even to the opera-going public, who are much more likely to find the dramas of Verdi, Puccini, Bellini, and Mozart on the program—the increasing recognition of their many glories is slowly making them less [...]
"I feel I am dying," Hector Berlioz wrote in one of his last letters. "I no longer believe in anything." Indeed, by 1869, Berlioz was a frustrated man who had long ago given up his Catholic faith and who had largely given up composing. For many years, the limited and intermittent success of his compositions had [...]
Love has inspired countless composers, some of whom have written pieces dedicated to, or directly inspired by, their own beloveds. Here are ten of the best musical love letters ever composed. 1. Wagner: Siegfried Idyll Though his reputation rests on his big, long, and loud mythological operas, Richard Wagner was also capable of composing on a [...]
The premier of 22-year-old Hector Berlioz's "Messe Solennelle" in 1825 was one of the most remarkable musical debuts ever by a composer, and the score's rediscovery 167 years later in a church attic is one of the most astounding events in musicological history. The fact that we today have this setting of the Mass by [...]
Hector Berlioz relished the spectacular sounds that could be achieved with massive orchestral forces, but he was much more than a musical showman. His gift for melody, his mastery of orchestration, his genius for musical drama, his bold originality, and the uniqueness of his style place him in the front ranks of the great composers. [...]
Could anything as tender and touching as "L’Enfance du Christ" have been written by a man who did not believe? One hopes that professed atheist Hector Berlioz was able to find the Christmas that he portrayed so beautifully. The poet Wallace Stevens once wrote that “The major poetic idea in the world is and always [...]
Le corsaire (The Corsair), Op. 21 is an overture composed while Berlioz was on holiday in Nice in August 1844. It was first performed under the title La tour de Nice (The Tower of Nice) on 19 January 1845. It was then renamed Le corsaire rouge (after James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Red Rover) and finally Le corsaire (suggesting Byron's poem The Corsair).* Berlioz scholar [...]