Music: Requiem at Tanglewood

To Hector Berlioz, the ideal orchestra consisted of 242 strings, 30 grand pianos, 30 harps, legions of wind players and (according to 19th century wags) a few heavy mortars. He was never able to command such an aggregation, but several times he came close, notably in his most magnificent score, the Grande Messe des Morts (Requiem). That opus calls for a 210-member chorus, full symphony orchestra, four separate brass choirs (labeled according to the points of the compass), plus a battery of 16 kettledrums. Few of today’s symphonies can afford to stage the work. At Tanglewood, Mass, last week, Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony Orchestra undertook the task, and the result was some of the loveliest (and loudest) music that ever echoed through the Berkshire hills.

Heavenly Gesture. The performance was not only a resounding windup for Tanglewood’s most successful season in its 17 years; it was a special victory for Composer Berlioz (1803-69). The respectable musical world has long regarded him as the giant who never grew up, an uneven talent full of romantic excesses (“Berlioz,” mocked his fellow composer Franz Liszt, “liked to fancy himself draining Death’s chalice to the dregs in a gloomy cavern, surrounded by Italian bandits, and gasping out a final curse upon mankind”). But slowly the critical tide has been turning. This year, following the 150th anniversary of his birth, orchestras across the U.S. have played more Berlioz than ever before. Tanglewood alone performed eight compositions—including the huge choral Te Deum and the Romeo and Juliet symphony—before the Requiem.

In Tanglewood’s huge, open-sided Music Shed last week, before a crowd of nearly 9,000. Conductor Munch touched his knuckles in a gesture of supplication, and gave the downbeat for what Berlioz called a “musical cataclysm.”

The first of the ten movements is a prayer for eternal peace, full of heartfelt sighs and dazzling sunbursts. The second (Dies Irae) begins with an insistent, plodding motif in the chorus, building up to a breakoff point when the four brass bands join in. At the work’s first performance (so Berlioz claimed), the conductor stopped at that point and had a pinch of snuff, while Berlioz himself leaped to the podium to save the performance. Conductor Munch last week took no chance on faulty entrances, had his warning arm pointing straight toward heaven four bars ahead. The brass bands broke loose (two were placed in the auditorium, giving a kind of stereophonic effect) ; they sounded for all the world like the trumps of doom.

Cathedral Hush. Everything following might be expected to be anticlimactic, but Berlioz achieves perhaps his greatest effects in the quieter passages that grip the heart after all the thunder. The superb Sanctus calls for a tenor solo in which, by a dazzling piece of orchestration, the single, defenseless human voice is set off against the relentless clash of cymbals; and in the sweet, concluding Agnus Dei, there are chilling traces of jagged pagan rhythms (later used by Stravinsky). Conductor Munch tenderly and forcefully drove toward the end, spinning out the Amen with a loving final touch. A cathedral hush hung beneath the bare steel rafters; then the crowd leaped up and cheered.

It was not the first time that the Requiem stirred an audience. When it happened in France 50 years ago, the conductor finally turned to the crowd and said sternly: “There can be no encores on the Day of Judgment.”