Grande Messe des Morts: a view from the chorus

“Monsieur Berlioz’s music is tiring for us artists.” This complaint was voiced by a representative of the chorus when, in 1850, the committee of the recently formed Société Philharmonique discussed plans to perform the Grande Messe des Morts to raise money for the families of soldiers who had died in a tragic accident (a bridge had collapsed while they were marching across it and over 200 officers and men had drowned).

He had a point. Parts of the Mass make considerable demands on the chorus, requiring a great deal of energy and almost athletic stamina to sing. This is partly because the dramatic sweep of the central movements is produced by sustained bursts of high-energy music in which the chorus has to hold its own against a background of powerful orchestral forces, and in which the tension has to build relentlessly towards tremendous climaxes.

But if this makes the music challenging it also makes it very exciting. In his orchestral writing Berlioz produces striking juxtapositions of timbre, and makes full use of the complete tonal range of each instrument. (He prided himself on knowing the exact compass of every instrument in the orchestra and despised contemporaries who stuck to a safe middle register out of ignorance as to just how high or how low a given instrument could reach). His choral writing is similarly inventive and daring. He frequently makes use of the extreme upper or lower registers of the human voice. The tenors’ line in Quid sum miser could just as easily be sung by altos, but placing them fairly high in the tenor voice adds to the expression of humility and fear (“humilité et crainte”, as marked in the score). Similarly, when the female voices accompany the solo tenor in the Sanctus the lower alto line could be sung by tenors, but the low women’s voices give the text a delicious, velvety warmth which male voices could not match.

Sometimes he uses voices as if they were instruments. For example, when the basses sing the words Quantus tremor est futurus… in flowing plainchant-like phrases the tenors break up the texture with a heavily accented reprise of the Dies irae text, for all the world like timpani, driving the melody along and breaking up the texture, while the sopranos provide sustained horn-like chords.

What is more, in this Requiem, unlike other large scale masses where key passages in the text, and the most interesting music, may be given to soloists, the chorus carries nearly all of the dramatic narrative. (Even the Sanctus, where the tenor soloist takes the lead, has some lovely music for sopranos and altos.)

Sometimes this is done by a single choral part completely unaccompanied, as when the sopranos intone the Dies irae for the first time, or with very sparse instrumentation as when the tenors take up the same melody, and the same desolate mood, with Quid sum miser. For one whole movement (Quaerens me) the choir sings unaccompanied. At other times the choir’s function is to add weight and richness to the huge blocks of sound fashioned by the instrumental forces distributed around the performance space, as in the Tuba mirum.

The effect of all this is that every section of the choir gets to sing some great tunes, and with a variety of moods: anxious (Dies irae), despairing (Quid sum miser), ferocious (Lacrymosa), serene (Hostias and Sanctus).

So, tiring though Monsieur Berlioz’s music might be for the chorus, it is also richly rewarding. Berlioz referred to pieces such as his Requiem and Te Deum as “grande musique”, meaning music on a grand scale, but it is also great music. Fortunately, back in 1850, the orchestral musicians in the Société Philharmonique realised this and overruled their colleagues in the chorus, so the Grande Messe des Morts was performed after all.

Notes by Glyn Jones, tenor.

Image copyright Maxime Aulio

Find out more

Behind the Notes homepage
On composing the Grande Messe des Morts
On getting paid for the Grande Messe des Morts
Listen to Grande Messe des Morts
Berlioz – the snuff incident