Word: requiems
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Digging Deep. Much of this material had to be dug out of the murk. One of Verdi's finest songs is the poignant Pieta, Signor, composed at the end of his career and reflecting much of the same hushed awe of his Manzoni Requiem; not mentioned in the standard Verdi catalogue, the song was flushed out of an obscure Italian library by Verdi Scholar David Stivender. Other long-lost scores, such as the charming and perky Wind Quintet by Ponchielli (of La Gioconda fame) were found in editions long out of print...
Amsterdam's renowned, 78-year-old Concertgebouw Orchestra, on the eve of a 1956 performance of the Cherubini Requiem in C Minor, desperately needed a substitute for ailing Conductor Carlo Maria Giulini; it turned to 27year-old Bernard Haitink, an assistant conductor and former second violinist of the Dutch Radio Orchestra, who had led the work not long before. "No," replied Haitink. "I'm not ready, and anyway, I'd like to stay alive." Hotter heads prevailed. Haitink conducted, and the familiar scenario spun to its happy conclusion: he was invited back by the Concertgebouw, soon began...
Television carried the pontifical Requiem Mass throughout Western Europe, beyond the Iron Curtain to Czechoslovakia, by satellite to the U.S. and parts of Asia. After the ceremony, German Catholic and Protestant churchmen and the visiting dignitaries followed the coffin the 385 yards from the cathedral to the Rhine, where it was placed aboard a German navy patrol boat for a 20-mile trip upstream to Adenauer's village of Rhondorf. There, in a private hillside cemetery, his body was lowered into a grave alongside the flower-decked ones of his two wives and infant...
...years as Chancellor Adenauer had presided over Cabinet meetings, the simple brown oak coffin lay in state for two days, while thousands of Germans filed past. Then, in the soaring, twin-spired Cathedral of Cologne, where he had knelt as the city's mayor, a pontifical Requiem Mass was to be sung by Josef Cardinal Frings. From Cologne, Adenauer's body was to be taken by a German navy patrol boat up the Rhine and back to RhÖndorf for burial in the secluded family plot where rest his two wives and an infant son.* Adenauer loved...
...periodically unfortunate intonation of the orchestra, occasional four-squareness, and general loss of intensity and concentration toward the end were somewhat disappointing. None of these faults, however, was outstanding enough to weaken the overall effect of the performance. This was a young Requiem-powerful, muscular, intelligent, lyric. In marble St. Paul's the result was overwhelming. Those who did not hear this particular Requiem are not likely to hear its kind in the near future, even on the best of stereo systems...