I have a personal fondness of Camille Saint-Saëns’ only Requiem. Admittedly it is only one of his minor works, and seldom performed due to its huge production costs, requiring a full orchestra, four (five?) voice soloists, a choir, and harp and an organ.
I had the chance to perform in a choir for a performance of the Requiem during high school. The production was somewhat messy, with choir members having to share photocopies of the complete score. That gave me the occasion to practice my score reading abilities, simply to discover that the score was really difficult to read. Saint-Saëns is often considered the last Romantic composer, and his sometimes early-Modern tonalities completely threw off my reading, being used to read Mozart and Bach. But the challenge paid off, especially for the last movement.
As an aside, it is difficult to talk about such things, since I surely sound like an elitist hipster. True, classical music isn’t very accessible, so many want to boast about such investment of time (the same way many programmers boast about using EMACS or Vim). But some people are lucky enough to be “musical polyglots”, and having access to such great landmarks of cultures past (language notwithstanding) is just an amazing.
All that to point out I don’t understand much Latin, so I had no clue what I was signing about, other than the harrowingly heart-wrenching music.
Published on October 7, 2012 at 22:04 EDT
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