Like the city itself, this Marseille Requiem reveled in expansive personality. It was a performance that can only be described as exuberant.
Taking over from the aged Lawrence Foster as music director of the Marseille Opéra, 32 years old, Milan-born conductor Michele Spotti brings an impressive new vitality into Marseille’s venerable old opera house, conducting two of 24/25 season’s six operas as well as this concert performance of the Verdi Requiem. Additionally the young maestro conducts two of the Opéra’s philharmonic orchestra’s ten concerts, while integrating all of this into his conducting activities in Paris, Vienna, Hamburg and Berlin.
Not only does this Verdi Requiem concert celebrate the new presence of this young conductor, it also commemorates the 100th anniversary of the reopening of Marseille’s Opéra, the earlier theater destroyed by fire in 1919, opening in a renewed, updated form in 1925, though its original façade, the peristyle of the 1787 theater still stands as the rebuilt theater’s façade.
Opera in Marseille has an impressive history. It was the first provincial city in France to erect an opera house, a permission of Louis XIV and his superintendent of music, Jean-Baptiste Lully. The Opéra de Marseille has a colorful recent history as well, a series of flamboyant general directors making it one of France’s most interesting stages in the late 20th century. It is now under the firm hand of Marseille born general director Maurice Xiberras who is coping with the art form’s current realities.
Too operatic for actual liturgical purposes, Verdi’s Messa da Requiem would benefit from super titles, given the obscurity these days of such prayers. Its program (story): a troubled soul seeks salvation, but must contend with terrifying forces that are duly spelled out, and these overwhelming forces only sometimes include forgiveness. While all of the Requiem’s four solo voices plead individually for salvation, Verdi grants the final, extended graveside prayer of the requiem “Libera me” to the soprano — in the Verdi hierarchy she is the most innocent of the voices — and of the voice that invites the terrifying Italianate suspicion of impurity.
The Marseille Opéra has an exceptionally fine and clear acoustic, and offers a very effective spectator/stage rapport. The theater’s pit was covered over, making place for the strings, the brass and winds were seated further back on risers together with the piece’s signature bass drum, and the Opéra’s chorus was placed yet higher, behind. The stage was in fact overwhelmed with musicians, the soloists somehow finding place in front of the maestro!
The Requiem’s pleas and threats poured into the house in whispers and explosions of massive sound, creating a vivid musical atmosphere wherein the Verdi genius erupted in its abstract declarations of man facing death seen through the scars of life. Maestro Spotti’s Requiem was about the theatricality of this moment, not its profound torment.
The Requiem opens with the stirring of soft strings, the four voice groups of the choir entering one by one, the Opéra’s splendid chorus was composed of a plentitude of individual male and female voices that that did not dissolve into a single homogenous chorale tone, announcing the expansive humanity of the Requiem interpreters. The four soloists introduced themselves one by one, each voice of unique operatic personality — French soprano Angelique Boudeville (a Saint-Etienne Leonora), Russian mezzo soprano Anna Goryachova (s Vienna Carmen), Peruvian tenor Iván Ayón-Rivas (a Paris Fenton), South Korean bass Simon Lim (a San Francisco Basilio).
The strings of the Opéra’s concert orchestra — more strings than in the pit orchestra — achieved an impressive warmth of tone for the “Introit” and hyper excited tremolos for the “Dies Irae.” The brass choir — with added antiphonal trumpets blown from the upper boxes — were of magnificent sound in their call to judgement, the “Tuba mirum.” The woodwind choir found the requisite complexities of tone to express the Requiem’s few moments of melancholy, the white tones of the flutes that join the voices to conclude the “Angus dei” made great effect in this movement’s terrifying calmness. The eight part fugue for the double chorus of the “Sanctus” erupted with the requisite energy in a seemingly flawless account of its massive complexities. The “Lux aeterna” shimmered in its brief moment of hope and relief.
The Opéra de Marseille orchestra gave an impressive, fully realized performance of the Requiem, allowing the genius of Verdi’s most abstract music to emerge in exceptional clarity.
Verdi had composed the “Libera me” of this Messi da Requiem dedicated to Alessandro Manzoni (1874) originally for his contribution to a 12 composer Messa da Requiem for Rossini, a project that did not happen at the time (1869) [it will happen this August as the final offering of the Pesaro Rossini Opera Festival!]. Though revised for the Manzoni Requiem the Rossini “Libera me” holds much of the thematic material of the Manzoni Requiem [Manzoni was an Italian poet and novelist of the first half of the 19th century whose fame equaled that of Verdi].
The “Libera me” is a complex piece evoking the urgent desperation, even panic, of the soul for salvation. It offers no comfort whatsoever, quoting the Requiem’s “Dies Irae” that often crashes into the prayer. The chorus then intones the Requiem’s “Requiem aeternum” before it breaks into a shattering fugue of desperation. It then dissolves into a final, soft, single note on which the soprano voice begs the final “libera me.”
The Spotti Requiem was a highly animated, thrilling account of a work that can sometimes discover the abstracted, confused, and truly profound moment that may well define the end of a human life.
Michael Milenski
Opéra de Marseille, January 19, 2025
All photos copyright Christian Dresse, courtesy of the Opéra de Marseille