Royal Albert Hall
20 July 2013
A celebration for connoisseurs,
but only rarely showing the composer at his best.
Verdi’s bicentenary is hardly noticed at the Proms, whereas
Wagner’s is being celebrated at extreme length and cost. I would much rather
this than the other way round, but still, one concert devoted to Verdi, and
mostly obscure minor works at that, is not doing the great dramatist any sort
of justice.
The first piece we heard isn’t even Verdi, but rather a
string arrangement, or enlargement, of his string quartet. As a quartet, the
piece may be a curiosity; in this distorted form it is merely tedious.
A late, occasional piece, the Ave Maria for soprano and
orchestra, made a useful complement with the equally late Ave Maria in the slightly
more familiar Four Sacred Pieces. Likewise the original version of the Requiem’s
thrilling Libera Me linked closely with the Te Deum in the four pieces.
I was struck by two consistent approaches Verdi has in his
overtly Christian music. On the one hand, through the Virgin, his sopranos pray
for support, though typically in vain, at least in the staged dramas.
On the other, he presents God, or his believers, in the most
fearsome and unyielding Old Testament style. This reaches a peak with the Dies
Irae section of the Libera Me and the Requiem, but can be found also in the Te
Deum, where the creator of this frightening world is appropriately presented as
worthy of awe and terror.
Verdi was agnostic, but the programme notes are greatly
undervaluing him by placing him in the same tradition as Brahms and Vaughan
Williams. This concert forcefully confirmed that Verdi entered the beliefs of
Christians with a dramatist’s skill, and presented two important aspects of
them with his customary straightforward brilliance.
For Verdi, Christianity is about recognising that the
horrors of the world are caused by God, perhaps justly (though perhaps not),
and then about desperately hoping to supplicate that God, typically through the
human closest to him, the Virgin.
Depending on preference, this music both supports and
critiques the beliefs of Christians, and no other composer has done this so
well. I cannot comprehend that Christians continue to find succour in Verdi’s
religious works, but this in itself is the highest praise of this composer, who
ought to be as controversial as his exact contemporary, Wagner.
Performances were excellent, and giving us an opportunity to
explore this composer’s beliefs is priceless.
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