Building the Requiem

Abstract Berlioz’s aesthetic of sacred music held that music could be deemed sacred not only by means of its compositional style, but also by the way that it sounded in a sacred space. Indeed, his very understanding of sacred music was deeply indebted to the physical and acoustic spaces of Parisian cathedrals. This chapter explores Berlioz’s connection of sacred sound with sacred space. It positions him as a nineteenth-century forebear of what scholars have called an "aural architect." In its simplest manifestation, aural architecture can be defined as the composite of numerous surfaces, objects, and acoustics in a complex spatial environment. Though much attention has been paid to the so-called "architectural" elements of the Requiem, this chapter explores Berlioz’s conception of the relationships between architectural space, orchestral writing, and the aesthetics of sacred music. It also outlines how contemporaneous listeners heard the Requiem in relation to physical space. In the end, it reveals that, when heard in sacred spaces, the Requiem’s sonic idiodyncracies—its "theatricalities"—offered Parisian listeners a distinctly religious experience by virtue of the numerous interactions between acoustic sound and physical space.