Rehearing the Requiem

Abstract This chapter considers the persistence of the notion that Berlioz’s Requiem is, at its core, a primer in Romantic theatricality and religious indifference. While the work continues to appeal to modern audiences, it also delights audience members who have come to expect Berlioz and his music to be the standard bearer of nineteenth-century dramatic, monumental, and programmatic Romanticism. This sort of appeal is not unlike that which surrounds other settings of the Requiem mass, including those by Verdi and Mozart, whose receptions have likewise been shaped by questions that ask what role expressive (dramatic) music should play in sacred music and how, if at all, the realms of the sacred and the secular should interact in musical works. Theatrical as it may appear, then, we may now rehear the Requiem as a study in sacred musical aesthetics, the sacred sublime, and aural architecture