@gloschor
I spent last Saturday rehearsing Berlioz’ Grande Messe des Morts in preparation for performances in the autumn. I’m still smitten by this piece and present my short list of favourite moments. N.B. I don’t want to imply that the rest of the Mass is no good, or that these are necessarily musically the best bits!
- Bar 55 of the Kyrie. The first real climax of the work, and where you begin to get some idea of what you might be in for.
- Bar 141 of the Dies Irae. The big guns finally arrive.
- Bar 240 ‘Judicanti responsura’. After another huge climax, one of a number of quiet, simple closing passages in this work, with the trademark flattened seventh in the bass.
- The second subject of the Lacrymosa. Berlioz got quite a bit of stick for this beautiful melody on the grounds of inappropriateness. But this is where you can pretend you’re singing Le Spectre de la Rose, until….
- THAT chord at bar 179. Some years ago, a black hole way out in space was found to be playing a very, very low B flat. And here’s the greatest chord of B flat ever composed. This chord is, quite literally, cosmic.
- Around bar 67 of the Offertory. Could this have inspired Wagner’s motif of Brünnhilde’s Pleading?
- The key change on the tenor soloist’s first ‘Sabaoth’. Only a French composer could have written this.
- Bar 70 of the Agnus Dei. This haunting passage for low voices takes a different turn from its previous occurrences.
- The closing Amens. Berlioz finished the Mass in a hurry and put together the final movement largely out of music from the earlier ones, with this little coda. (In fact he needn’t actually have bothered setting ‘Amen’ at all as it doesn’t occur in the text of the Requiem Mass at this point.) But when he revised the work he didn’t recompose this bit, so he must have been satisfied with it.
If you’ve been counting, you’ll realise that my list has only nine items. There are a number of possibilities for the tenth one – I’ll wait until I’ve heard an orchestra playing the music, which may make the choice easier, or indeed suggest alternatives.
[And having performed it, I know what to nominate for no. 10 – the interrupted cadence at bar 95 of the Rex tremendae.]