January 20, 2012

Mozart - Requiem (1791)

Mozart - Requiem (1791)
Rating: 10.0

Sometimes when I listen to classical music, I feel so detached from the time it was written, a lost world that has long been buried, rotten away. But the year 1791 was a relatively short time ago if you put it into a historical context. 1791, the French Revolution was in its infancy, Europe was transforming more into the land we know it as today and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart himself passed on to the next world.

I play football every week and this afternoon I warmed myself up by turning the volume on my speakers up and letting the beauty of the Requiem flood all the rooms of my house. After getting everything I needed ready - my ball, my boots, my bottles of water - I turned on the shower and stood under the blast of hot water, basking in the glory of the Lord, the power of the music.  Precious droplets dripped from my nose, my eyebrows my lips, every one a wondrous gift from God. Even though I was enjoying the riches of this modern time, with the miracle of boiling water on tap, I was taken back to the year 1791 in my mind and to an unknown place of the universe in my heart, as I was with God. My face slumped against the wall of the shower. I felt as if I had reached a spiritual zenith, under the deluge of water, as the angels sang Lacrimosa.

There is an objective standard to all art, if you are a religious man. If God is perfect, and we as human beings are but animals, individual holy temples, with free will and the spirit of the Lord inside us all, then striving to make Godly art is one pursuit of perfection. That is why I give the Requiem a perfect 10.0 rating, because it is a complete, divine work. It is music worthy of our creator, and I am humbled and brought down to earth when I listen to it, but also elated and lifted to a celestial plane of spirituality and oneness with God.

Mozart is a genius, a word used lightly in our modern culture, but if you look at the etymology of the word genius it is undeniable that it applies to Mozart and his work on Requiem. It derives from the Roman belief of "genius", in that there is a divine essence in every human being, animal and thing on earth.  Mozart was in touch with the most righteous and Godly aspect of his soul when he wrote the Requiem, his genius.  You can tell as its devotional, ethereal refinement transcends you to another world, a state of wonder and amazement.  You don't just listen to the Requiem, you experience it.

But Mozart did not even write the whole composition himself.  The Requiem was an unfinished work of his before his death of the same year and it was finished by a relatively unknown Austrian composer by the name of Franz Xaver Süssmayr.  Still, it is the work of God, vicariously, through man, whoever wrote it, and so it does not matter who dipped what quill into the inkwell.  If God took Mozart from us before he finished this divine work, then whoever completed it was destined to by the Lord himself.  The Requiem, the music God intended everyone on earth to hear.

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