Luceat! French Baroque Requiem performed at Hertford
8 November 2013
On Wednesday 6 November 2013, Hertford College Chapel held its annual requiem service. Each year, the organ scholars and choir perform a different requiem from the repertoire. This year, the Messe de Requiem of the French Baroque composer André Campra was chosen. Apart from this uplifting, lyrical music, the highpoint is the reading of the names of those whom we love who have died at the altar in the chapel. Many members of the college were present to hear the names of their loved ones read in this moving ceremony. The Chapel Choir, Soloists and Players were superbly conducted by Ed Whitehead, third-year music student and senior organ scholar. Listen to the recording below.
Because of it themes of death and mortality, risen life and immortality, many composers have set the liturgical texts of the requiem to music. The requiem takes its name from the first line that is sung in the service: Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine, ‘Give them eternal rest, Lord’. The second line is et lux perpetua luceat eis, ‘and let light perpetual shine upon them’, and Campra focuses on the repetition of luceat, ‘shine’, as his keyword for the entire work. These two lines begin the introit, or entrance antiphon, but are repeated at various points in the service.
André Campra (1660–1744) was variously maître de musique in Toulon, his home town of Aix, Arles, Toulouse, Montpellier, Notre Dame de Paris and the chapelle royale of Louis XV. He excelled in composing opéra-ballets, and this musical style influenced his sacred music, much to the ire of his ecclesiastical patrons. The balletic quality can be felt in this requiem.
Campra’s Requiem is scored for a baroque chamber orchestra, choir and at vocal trio consisting of haute-contre, tenor and bass. Its movements include the usual ‘ordinary of the mass’: the Kyrie, Sanctus and Agnus Dei. Alongside these staples, he set the four proper antiphons for a requiem mass: the Introit, Gradual, Offertory and Communion antiphons. Strikingly, Campra omitted music for the lengthy requiem sequence Dies Iræ, with its fire-and-brimstone vision of the day of judgement, which had come to be seen as pastorally inappropriate. Neither did he set an excerpt from it, such as Lacrimosa or Pie Jesu. Instead, Campra’s glorious Offertory antiphon — the Domine Jesu Christe— takes centre stage, with surging, uplifting music as the priest goes to the altar and prepares bread and wine.