Rory, Mozart and Requiem Mass

Engaged couples are encouraged to discuss weighty, practical topics, but my now-husband needed no encouragement. Before long, he brought up the mournful subject of his eventual — hopefully distant — demise.

“If he survives me, Rory is in charge of my Requiem Mass,” he said.

Not “Carry my body north of the Tay,” mind you. Not “I’ll write a will and put it in this drawer.” Not “Darling, about my hefty insurance policy…” No.  Just “Rory is in charge of my Requiem Mass.”

Rory is the church organist and therefore a very important person in our liturgically rich lives. He can be trusted to give Mark a solemn send-off and not sneak in “When the Saints Go Marching In” or permit Mark’s widow (crazed by grief) to hear “Wind Beneath My Wings” waft over Mark’s catafalque. I thought Rory might even compose a new funeral Mass setting, but I checked yesterday, and he is too much of a fan of the traditional Requiem Mass chants to do so.

Perhaps because the leaves are falling and November, the month of the dead, is approaching, I have been thinking about a 13th-century Requiem hymn called the Dies Irae (Day of Wrath). The Dies Irae was a sequence sung at Masses for the dead until 1970, when it was pronounced too negative. (Interestingly, though, it was one of the five sequences, chosen from among thousands, preserved by the Council of Trent in its reform of the liturgy.) In the Dies Irae the writer, generally believed to be a Franciscan named Thomas of Celano, describes Judgment Day and begs God to admit him among the saved.

As a piece of Latin poetry, the Dies Irae is tremendously impressive. It is entirely trochaic and each line of the original three-line stanzas rhymes. I cannot begin to imagine how difficult it must have been to write. Chant the first verse to get the effect:

Dies irae, dies illa (Day of wrath, that day)

Solvet saeclum in favilla (will dissolve the world in ashes)

Teste David cum Sibylla (as both David and the Sibyl predicted.)

I enjoy the reference to the pagan priestess of Apollo. It smacks of interreligious dialogue. Indeed, the Church once had a very interesting relationship with classical pagan literature and art; St. Augustine couldn’t purge his love for it, and Michaelangelo painted sibyls in the Sistine Chapel. Meanwhile, the very suggestion that there might actually be a day of wrath, as Scripture strongly suggests, is startling to someone who grew up almost entirely on hymns like “Sing a New Song.”

Quantus tremor est futurus (How much trembling there will be)

Quando judex est venturus (when the Judge has come)

Cuncta stricte discussurus! (investigating everything strictly.)

People born well before the Second Vatican Council have often told me how lucky my generation was to have been taught about a God of love and not about a God of judgment. I understand that past generations concentrated too much on the justice of God and not enough on His mercy. However, I posit that this can be taken too far in the opposite direction. For example, I give you George Sodini, the man who killed three women and injured nine before turning his gun on himself in his health club last year.  

In his online journal, Sodini claimed that his pastor said that even a mass murderer could go to heaven. Whether the pastor omitted, or Sodini refused to hear, the bit about repentance, confession and penance, I do not know. At any rate, Sodini wrote, “Christ paid for EVERY sin, so how can I or you be judged by God for a sin when the penalty was ALREADY paid?” He mentioned that he had begun reading the Bible so as to get to know something about “God and Jesus” as he’d be meeting them soon. His presumption, like his murderous attack, is stomach-churning. God preserve us from badly catechized armchair theologians with guns.

One of the most beautiful settings of the Dies Irae and, indeed, of the entire Requiem Mass, was begun by W.A. Mozart and finished by his pupil F. X. Sϋssmayr. Requiem, K. 626, was the last work Mozart ever composed. For the first time, this week I settled down with a CD of this Mass and my trusty New Roman Missal (1945) and followed along with undivided attention. It was, quite literally, a religious experience. The salubriously scary parts were awe-inspiring, and the writer’s pleading, illustrated momentarily by a single voice, filled my eyes with tears. Far from being irredeemably negative, the Dies Irae always holds out hope:

Pie Jesu Domine (Kind Lord Jesus)

Dona eis requiem (give them peace.)

Amen.