Messa da Requiem - Schedule, Program & Tickets

Messa da Requiem

Premiere on May 22, 1874 in Milan; Premiere at the Deutsche Oper Berlin on November 3, 2001
In Latin

1 hour 15 minutes / No break

Giuseppe Verdi once described death as "the greatest catastrophe of human life." In his MESSA DA REQUIEM, as in his operas, he focuses on the human being and his inner reality. His funeral Mass is not for the church but for the world - Verdi gives the text of the Latin liturgy a human answer. With the musical drama that is known from his operas, he evokes the horrors of death, the end times and damnation through a gigantic tableau of intense emotions: fear, anger, pain, grief and yearning for salvation. Verdi touches secrets of our existence. His music gives us an idea that there is no certainty for comfort, no reason for hope other than ourselves.

Achim Freyer, the poetic theater maker, has come across this musical drama with a great design of epic music theater. For the viewer, parallel to the experience of Verdi's emotionally charged and in the sound structure at the same time almost barren music, this means the observation of a dance of the living and the dead, a "dance of death, as he puts it. Like in a mobile frieze, the fantastically costumed players of his Freyer ensemble perform again and again across the stage, as if in an infinite time.

What makes - yesterday and today - the fascination of this work? Perhaps it is the dramatist Verdi, who grasps with tangible realism the hidden scenic of these texts and approaches the greatest mystery of human existence: death. The extent to which the Dies irae and the funeral prayer Libera me occupy shows which parts of the funeral mass have occupied Verdi the hardest. The focus is on the horror of death - a terror for the living, which does not promise a vision of a gracious God.

Freyer also approaches the factory from this side. "I would like to dedicate the production to all victims of ideological violence of all centuries," he says and asks: "What can we as artists do for the present, for the future victims?" One response is the renunciation of the sentimental, for it sees in unreflective sentimentality he the danger of slipping into the ideological. Freyer does not want to spread illusions, but to show people the possibility of productive interaction with "what is". And there is great potential: a utopia of its own, "which we do not inherit, not through education, but which exists explicitly in man, in his soul: a utopia that begins with the capacity to think."

"A sad man knows that such a kind of theater is stronger than to respond to this war," Achim Freyer had already declared ten years ago, when the violence reached the Balkans. Freyer's pictures are strong and impressive, he himself a man who knows how to distinguish between sentimentality and sensibility. Who knows the sensibility of force and abhors violence as something terrible.

"As with Handel's Messiah and Bach's Mass in B Minor, scene-painter Achim Freyer took the risk of arranging a procession of songs and dances of death along the music on three levels (Underworld, Earth, Sky) that will make every kid's heart shudder to let. From Breughel to Picabia and de Chirico's "disquieting muses", the figurative quotation for this picture-book oratorio from the Last Judgment is enough. It is the perfect scenic illustration of a church-faring, musically powerful uplifting songbook liturgy - an imaginatively costumed danse macabre ... "(Günter Engelhard, Rheinischer Merkur.

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