Campra : Requiem

André Campra (1660-1744) Requiem Duration: 1h15 without interval The interpretation of religious texts is a fascinating field.

Across the ages, through councils, but also through the people who bring them to life, their reading evolves, takes on new colours, and may even change entirely.

The text of the Requiem Mass, which appeared around the 10th century, is associated in the collective imagination with the last liturgy of life, with the passage towards death and eternal rest, in a climate swinging between terror and serenity.

Indeed, the text evokes as much that day of wrath (Dies Irae) as the eternal light and the calm it brings for ever (Lux aeterna). Over the centuries, the soundscape that these texts of the Mass for the Dead have given rise to also shows how composers felt and interpreted them.

Thus, in Lalande, the sequence of the Dies Irae evokes what the great preachers of the chapel of Louis XIV must have been like. In the silence, a voice rings out.

A priest, in the pulpit, addresses not the altar with his back to the Lord, but the court, a few metres from the courtiers.

Desperate ills call for desperate remedies: souls must be struck with images strong enough to counterbalance all the vanities of the world, so powerful in their eyes.

The orator plays on silences and on the acoustics of the place to astonish, hurls truths drawn from the Scriptures, illustrates them by making each listener personally concerned, touching them to the soul.

He uses sharp contrasts: these breaks have a direct effect on the heartbeat of every person in the congregation.

Then come the fictions: the flames of hell are described as Hieronymus Bosch had painted them earlier, each sinner is threatened with the image of a powerful God who will inflexibly separate the good from the wicked, surrounded by the angels of heaven, the very ones that the painting and architecture of the place represent so well.