Program Notes

Maurice Duruflé Requiem

Duruflé was born in Louviers, Normandy, and received early musical training at the cathedral in Rouen, where there was a famous school of Gregorian chant. This repertory of liturgical song had become something of a French specialty in the nineteenth century, when controversy arose over the correct interpretation of the medieval manuscripts in which the chant melodies were compiled. The notation used to set down the tunes was well understood with regard to pitch but mysterious with regard to rhythm. Among the scholars working on the problem were a group of Benedictines at the French monastery of Solesmes, who developed a theory of chant rhythm as a free succession of notes of mostly equal value in groups of two and three. The Solesmes school of chant restoration and performance achieved widespread acceptance in the Catholic church and even some Protestant congregations.

After a thorough steeping in this tradition, Duruflé came to Paris and studied at the Conservatoire, where he confronted the tradition of Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel. His composition teacher was Paul Dukas, remembered largely for The Sorcerer's Apprentice, a gripping orchestral scherzo. It was perhaps here that Duruflé developed a dramatic or even cinematic manner to complement the meditative side of his musical personality.

Like the earliest composers of polyphonic Requiems, Duruflé took the Gregorian plainchant Mass for the Dead as his raw material. His declared intention was "to reconcile, as far as possible, Gregorian rhythm. . . . with the exigencies of modern meter." That is, he did not transcribe literally the original melodies with their irregular alternation of twos and threes; he adjusted the rhythms subtly so that larger metric patterns emerge, but still he allowed the meter to shift frequently so that a sense of spontaneity is preserved. At the same time, he clothed the sometimes archaic-sounding melodies in sophisticated harmonies of the early modern school.

In the opening movement, the first section of the text ("Requiem aeternam") is sung by the lower voices to a lightly reshaped version of the original melody; the high voices then continue with the middle section of the melody ("Te decet hymnus"), but transposed to different starting pitches as if in a bow to modern expectations of harmonic contrast; finally the original melody returns, but this time in the strings, while the voices sing a slow-moving accompaniment. The Kyrie follows without pause; here the plainsong melody is dressed in imitative texture and spread among the four voice parts. Again the middle section ("Christe eleison") is set off by a passage through contrasting keys, and the return of the words "Kyrie eleison" is matched with a fortissimo resolution to the original key of F major.

As Fauré had done in composing his Requiem, Duruflé chose not to set the "Dies irae" sequence that comes next in the liturgical text, so that the next movement is the offertory ("Domine Jesu Christe"). Here Duruflé takes a looser approach to the chant material as he intimates a naive survivor's distress over the lion's mouth and the bottomless pit that threaten the souls of the departed. As if in reply to this expression of fear and grief, the Sanctus movement builds from exotic percussion and brass motifs, background music for a procession through Jerusalem perhaps, to a massive climax suggestive of divine power and majesty.

Duruflé again follows Fauré in inserting after the Sanctus the very last words of the "Dies irae" sequence ("Pie Jesu") and in setting this text as a simple and poignant solo for female vocalist (here a mezzo-soprano). His Agnus Dei and Lux aeterna preserve the Gregorian melodies intact, but again in each movement Duruflé creates harmonic contrast and drama by recasting the tune in different keys and interweaving countermelodies of his own invention. The Mass for the Dead ends here, but Duruflé like Fauré concludes his Requiem with two texts imported from the separate Burial Service. The Libera me speaks of terror and ecstasy in its evocation of the judgment that awaits the living as well as the dead. There follows a brief but fully realized statement of otherworldly serenity to bring the Requiem to a close.

Notes copyright 1998 by Jonathan Wiener