Word: requiem
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...death in 1791 at age 35 is a rich source of drama and speculation. The man whom Joseph Haydn unhesitatingly acknowledged as his superior struggles against a fatal fever to complete his last composition. The D Minor Requiem is written for Count Franz Walsegg-Stuppach, who wormed a place in history by secretly commissioning the work in order to pass it off as his own. Several bars of the Lacrymosa are probably the last notes Mozart ever wrote. The requiem was completed by his student Franz Süssmayr...
...Brahms. It's about New York in the '60s. The story is very simple. The young woman is a pianist, and she contracts cancer, and her husband leaves her, in a rage, before she dies. And after she dies, he conducts a performance of the Brahms Requiem, and the last part of the novel is entirely about what's going through his mind. And it's a novel about the fact that there is no day of judgment after death...
John Nelson, 40, of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. Formerly a choral conductor, Nelson has an easy, fluent way with some of the grandest pieces in the repertory, like the Berlioz Requiem. He first came to attention when he organized an uncut performance of Berlioz's sprawling opera Les Troyens at Carnegie Hall in 1972 and then conducted the work the following year at the Met. An imaginative programmer, he has championed offbeat works like Shostakovich's Symphony No. 15, the composer's enigmatic symphonic valedictory...
...Spoleto Festival and of Art park, a state park for the arts in Lewiston, N.Y.; he frequently conducts at the New York City Opera. Keene is a master of the grand gesture and can make the sparks fly even in a piece as reflective as Britten's War Requiem. An exponent of new music, he led the U.S. premiere in 1981 of Philip Glass's visionary opera, Satyagraha...
...Bishop's father liked to lecture his son about how, in his own days as an altar boy in Jersey City, he had been upbraided by the parish priest for yawning at a funeral. So when his father died, Bishop spent the requiem Mass watching an altar boy. "He almost made it to the end. Then the palm of his hand came up to his mouth. He yawned." Just one of death's little ironies, the kind that Bishop ran through his Smith-Corona portable for such bestsellers as The Day Lincoln Was Shot (1955), The Day Christ...