This year, our Good Friday Choral Vespers service will feature the music of Mozart’s Requiem. I thought it might be useful to explain how we are working with this piece. Mozart’s Requiem (like those by Verdi, Fauré, Duruflé, and many others) is a musical setting of a Requiem Mass, a Catholic worship service offered for the souls of people who have died. It’s funeral music that reflects old church themes of death, judgment, mercy, salvation, and eternal rest. Mozart’s setting is dramatic, dark, haunting, and beautiful. Is it appropriate for use in a New Church observance of Good Friday?
The text of the Requiem Mass is drawn from scripture, including books that the New Church does not consider part of the Word, like 2 Esdras, which is quoted in the opening words: “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine….” (Latin for “Eternal rest grant them, O Lord….”). It includes some direct quotations, but much of it is in the form of prayers to God for mercy, with many allusions to ideas and images from the Word. On the face of them, some parts can be off-putting to a New Church person. For example, here is a translation of “Lacrimosa,” one of the better-known pieces from the work: “Mournful that day, when from the dust shall rise, guilty man to be judged. Therefore, spare him, O God.” This sounds like it’s talking about people waiting in the grave till some latter day when they will rise and also a judging God who needs to be begged to forgive a guilty person. What purpose might this serve at one of our worship services?
What is the right music to accompany the story of the Lord praying in agony in the garden? There are many good options. In 2023, we used “It is Enough,” Felix Mendelssohn’s setting of the prophet Elijah’s words from 1 Kings 19 expressing his hopelessness and despair. This year, we are thinking of using “Lacrimosa” as an expression of the kind of darkness and judgment that the Lord was fighting while praying in the garden as He struggled to rescue the world from the condemnation of hell.
Our goal is to be in conversation with the text and music of Mozart’s Requiem. We will be putting the pieces in a different order and a different context to draw thematic and tonal connections between the music and the text from the Gospel of Luke. We will also be shining the light of the Heavenly Doctrine on all of it, like the wonderful passage below about praying for the Lord’s mercy. Even if classical music is not your thing, I hope you’ll consider this Good Friday offering as part of your observation of Easter this year.
There are two duties that we are obliged to perform after we have examined ourselves: prayer and confession. The prayer is to be a request that the Lord have mercy on us, give us the power to resist the evils that we have repented of, and provide us an inclination and desire to do what is good, since “without him we cannot do anything” (John 15:5). The confession is to be that we see, recognize, and admit to our evils and that we are discovering that we are miserable sinners. …. The Lord was leading us in our self-examination; He disclosed our sins; He inspired our grief and, along with it, the motivation to stop doing them and to begin a new life. (True Christian Religion 539)