Pärt/ Fauré

Gabriel Fauré’s “Requiem” was written in Paris over a century before the "Lamentate" for piano and orchestra by the Esthonian composer, Arvo Pärt. Both works express their creators’ response to the self-evident, but nonetheless shattering, realisation that our time on Earth is limited.

Pärt, a composer of mystic, intensely spiritual music, was seized by a sense of his unreadiness before life’s everdwindling time when he visited Anish Kapoor’s gigantic “Marsyas” installation at London’s Tate Modern in 2002. His musical reaction to the sight of an enormous red membrane suspended in space—a reference to the blood of the unfortunate satyr skinned after his defeat by Apollo—is a lamentation not for the dead, but for the living who have to deal with pain and disappointment. However, his fear of life’s end ultimately led him to create a work in which time seems stretched out to infinity, just like the space which hosted “Marsyas”.

Fauré’s “Requiem” takes a different approach. In it, the composer is already envisioning the far bank of the Acheron, and his life-after-death is more jubilant liberation: a journey towards joy rather than an experience of ultimate sorrow. Fauré bypasses the fear of the Day of Judgement so familiar in Catholic ecclesiastical music and sets his sights on the tranquillity of eternal rest. The music describes an ever-heightening sense of exaltation which culminates in the luminous bliss of the “In Paradisum”.