How a Latin word for rest became a genre for the concert hall
Requiem simply means rest in Latin, taken from the opening plea of the Catholic Mass for the dead: grant them eternal rest, O Lord. That funeral liturgy inspired so much music, from Ockeghem to Mozart, Verdi and Fauré, that the requiem escaped the church and became a concert form of its own.
The traditional service was stripped down compared with an ordinary Mass. It dropped the Gloria and the Creed, the kiss of peace and the final blessing, replaced the Alleluia with a Tract as in Lent, and ended with a prayer that the dead may rest in peace rather than the usual dismissal. Black vestments were required, and a fearsome poem about Judgment Day, the Dies irae, was an obligatory part until reforms after the Second Vatican Council shifted the emphasis toward trust in the Resurrection.
For centuries the texts were sung to Gregorian chant. The oldest polyphonic setting to survive is by Johannes Ockeghem, from the second half of the 15th century, possibly modelled on a lost one by Dufay. Antoine Brumel's, around 1500, was the first to include the Dies irae. In the 16th century composers such as Pierre de La Rue and Cristóbal Morales took up the form, and Jean Richafort wrote a six-voice requiem mourning Josquin des Prez.
Other churches developed their own versions. In the 17th century Heinrich Schütz and Michael Praetorius wrote Lutheran adaptations that later inspired Brahms, whose German Requiem sets words from the Lutheran Bible. The Anglican Book of Common Prayer had no Requiem Mass but a burial service, whose seven funeral sentences were set by Purcell, Gibbons and others. In Eastern Orthodoxy the full requiem is a vigil of about three and a half hours, so long it is rarely served except on the eve of a saint's canonisation in Russian practice.
The drama of the words proved irresistible. Composers originally wrote for actual services, but settings like Verdi's are essentially concert works. The term now stretches further still, covering music about death and mourning that has no liturgical purpose at all.
Source: Requiem
