Bernard Labadie’s 9/11 Requiem Mass of Hope
by Astrid Brunner
Together with the mixed-voice chamber choir, La Chapelle de Qu�bec, which Labadie founded in 1985, Les Violons du Roy (Labadie’s 15-member chamber orchestra modeled on the court orchestras of the French kings, and, since its inception in 1984, grown into one of Canada’s internationally acclaimed orchestras) happened to be in the vicinity at the time of the tragedy of 9/11. Just a week later, Bernard Labadie and Les Violons du Roy performed Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Requiem Mass for the Dead (K626) at New York City’s Lincoln Center, and recorded it live on September 20, 2001 at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall in Troy, NY (Dorian CD recordings Catalog No. DOR-90310).
Tragedy is a strange thing. When it strikes it is at the same time terrible and real, and yet more surreal than the most cruelly illuminated nightmare. You reach out to touch it and it’s gone. You close your eyes and it’s there to touch with your mind’s eye–terrible and beautiful, like Yeats’ "rough beast… slouch[ing] towards Bethlehem."
We have run out of words since that fateful day of 9/11. But when words fail, music speaks. Labadie understands this perfectly: music is there "to comfort, console and most importantly to restore hope," he says in the textual notes to the recent CD release of his Mozart Requiem in memory of 9/11….. "Few works of art speak with such urgency of darkness and illumination, of the depths of despair and of summits of hope, of suffering and of consolation, of judgment and mercy." In this view, Mozart’s Requiem Mass is ultimately a Mass of Hope, where life and death and life again are strung like pearls from some Shakespearean deep.
Tragedy is a great promoter of art, especially music; and music is a great evocator of human thought and feeling. Even a fraction of the recent performance history of Mozart’s Requiem Mass makes this clear: in 1991, Sir Georg Solti conducted the 200th anniversary of Mozart’s death memorial performance in the St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, using the traditional and most enduring version of the work Mozart left unfinished when he died in 1791; in 1994, Zubin Mehta, with Jos� Carreras and Ruggero Raimondi, and with the Cathedral choir and the Philharmonic Orchestra of Sarajevo, created the video Mozart: The Requiem From Sarajevo (A&E Catalog No AAE-10072) in the shelled ruins of the war-ravaged city’s once grand National Library. Mozart’s breathtaking music both dignifies and makes more heartrending the haunting performances, and the images of war and destruction–but here, too, the artists speak of "the celebration of the human spirit", and of the "ultimately uplifting" quality of the music. Here, too, death is life, and resurrection is another word for hope. Mozart’s last work, the Requiem Mass, is especially suited to express this–profoundly, hauntingly, dramatically, spiritually, transparently.
" Transparent" is the key word Robert Levin uses when discussing his 1996 version of Mozart’s Requiem–and Levin’s is the score Labadie uses for his 9/11 memorial performances and recording. When Mozart died on the 5th of December 1791, he left the score of the Requiem unfinished. Historical storytelling has it that the music at the composer’s funeral was a version of the Requiem hastily finished by one or several of his pupils, and that a year later the Baron van Swieten conducted a memorial performance of the Requiem in Vienna based on the notations by Suessmayr, the historically most notable and enduring of the Requiem "amenders". The choice of the Mozart Requiem score has become an important and telling interpretive step by the conductor: it is tantamount to an interpretation, an emphasis on what a particular orchestration or the placement of the fugue at the end of each major section of the Requiem is intended to mourn or celebrate, and how to do so.
Choosing a version of the posthumously finished scores is like choosing one of the many mysteries of who commissioned the Requiem from Mozart and why. There are ingenious and darkly romantic tales, from the Count von Walsegg who commissioned Mozart’s last work anonymously in order to give it out as his own, to the Salieri so brilliantly dramatized by Peter Shaeffer in his "Amadeus" play and Academy Award-winning film script.
But what ultimately matters, of course, is what is right artistically. And when it comes to artistic judgments Labadie’s must be counted amongst the best in the era to which Mozart belongs. The musical world has recognized this widely by now: in the spring next year Labadie and his Violons du Roy will tour Europe, with concerts in Bergen, London, Paris and Mozart’s own Salzburg; he will continue his impressive guest-conducting engagements in Japan and all over North America, including debuts with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic; and he will exchange his position as artistic director held with L’Op�ra de Qu�bec since 1994, for the same responsibilities with L’Op�ra de Montr�al; and with his debut this summer at the Glimmerglass Opera in upstate New York–at what The Wall Street Journal describes as "the rural upstate oasis of lakeside, charm, history, art and baseball"–Labadie will indulge in the opera genre of the musical period he loves, and which makes him the perspicacious interpreter of Mozart’s dramatically astute music that he is: if you have a chance, see Labadie’s production of Handel’s Orlando, with countertenor Bejun Mehta in the lead.
With Labadie, whose concern is with the faithful historical rendering of the baroque and early classical repertoire, the choice of Levin’s version of Mozart’s Requiem is not altogether surprising. For Levin an important element of his Requiem score was another sacred work by Mozart, the C-Minor Mass. It is one of the composer’s most luminous, translucent, transparent works–the very qualities to express the poignancy of hope and light in the presence of tragedy and darkness.
After Labadie’s performance of Mozart’s Requiem at the Lincoln Center a bare week after 9/11, the critics, for once, gave over the niceties of their professional games and went for the emotional pulse of it all. Discussions of which editorial version might be the truest to Mozart’s intentions went undiscussed. It didn’t matter much whether Solti, with his Eybler-Freystaedtler-Suessmayr score, however traditionally and mythically established, was right or not. Nor did it matter, for purposes of academic discussion, why Labadie’s choice of Levin’s lucid and orchestrally lightened score might be preferable. What mattered was the music. Or to say it with the Salieri in Shaeffer’s Amadeus: what mattered was the voice of God.
What mattered was the sorrow taken over by Mozart’s music. What mattered was the tragedy mourned, the tragedy sublimated, the tragedy accepted for the gathering of new strength in the face of unspeakable sorrow. And this is how the New York Times expressed it: "The soloists, orchestra and choir were equally effective and affecting in Mr. Labadie’s brisk, passionate reading of the Mozart Requiem….. Mr. Labadie used Robert Levin’s superb completion of Mozart’s final, unfinished score…. On another occasion the listener might have dwelled on the musicological niceties of this version, but on Saturday it was the music’s emotional sweep that carried the moment." And the recently released CD of Labadie’s Requiem Mass of Hope by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart carries the moment still.
Astrid Brunner lives, writes and publishes by French Lake near Fredericton and in Linthal, Switzerland. She has written, translated and performed texts for Canadian composers as diverse as Marc Patch (temps de glace temps de verre), Kenneth Nichols (Requiem of Thorns) and Halifax composer Sandy Moore (Rilke: The Other Side of Air).
