Verdi's Requiem grew from a failed tribute to Rossini
When Rossini died, Verdi rallied a dozen Italian composers to write a Requiem together, and wrote the final movement himself. The joint project collapsed days before its premiere. Five years later, grief for the novelist Alessandro Manzoni drove Verdi to finish a Requiem alone, reusing that movement, and it became a choral staple.
Rossini died in 1868, and Verdi proposed to his publisher Ricordi that Italy's leading composers share the writing of a memorial Mass. He contributed the closing Libera me, and within a year a Messa per Rossini had been assembled by Verdi and twelve others. It was due to be heard on 13 November 1869, a year after Rossini died, yet the organisers abandoned it nine days beforehand. Verdi blamed the conductor, Angelo Mariani, even though Mariani had supported the project, and their friendship never recovered. The collaborative work went unheard until Helmuth Rilling finally performed it in Stuttgart in 1988.
Verdi had revered Manzoni all his adult life and met him in 1868. When the writer died on 22 May 1873, Verdi resolved to compose a whole Requiem himself, began work in Paris that June and folded in a revised version of his Rossini Libera me. The piece calls for four soloists, a double choir and orchestra, and lasts about 90 minutes.
It was first heard in Milan's San Marco church on 22 May 1874, a year to the day after Manzoni's death, with Verdi conducting. Three of the four soloists, including the soprano Teresa Stolz, had sung in the European premiere of Aida in 1872. The same forces repeated it at La Scala three days later. Success was swift but not universal: Paris's Opéra-Comique gave seven performances, Venice built lavish Byzantine-style decor for it, yet London's new Royal Albert Hall could not fill its seats for so Catholic an occasion. Boston's Handel and Haydn Society gave the American premiere in 1878.
The work later dropped out of the repertoire before returning in the 1930s. Because it is so operatic, it is usually performed as a concert rather than in church. Musicologist David Rosen judges it probably the most often performed major choral work written after Mozart's Requiem.
Source: Requiem (Verdi)
