Gabriel Fauré's Requiem - Benefit Concert for the Freiburg Palliative Care Network

Cappella Nova Freiburg e.V. will perform the work in the version for organ and choir, conducted by Katharina Skala. Performers include:
Natalie Beck, soprano; Uli Bützer, baritone; David Kiefer, organ

“After all these years of accompanying funeral services on the organ—
—I know it all by heart! I wanted to write something different.”
This is how Gabriel Fauré, born May 12, 1845, in Pamiers in the Pyrenees, and died November 4,
1924, in Paris, described his Requiem. He composed the work of his own accord, prompted at most
by the deaths of his father (1885) and his mother (1887). On January 16, 1888, it was premiered
on the occasion of the annual memorial service for the esteemed architect Joseph-Michel Le
Soufaché at the Church of St. Madeleine in Paris, where Fauré was then serving as organist
and choir director.
... and Fauré wrote something else! He did not set to music the entire text of the Requiem Mass commonly known at the time as *
*. Initially, Fauré set only five movements to music: “Introït et Kyrie,” “Sanctus,” “Pie
, Jesu,” “Agnus Dei,” and “In paradisum,” written for a small choir with
organ accompaniment. He did not add the “Offertoire” and “Libera me” until 1889. By 1894,
Fauré had continued to expand the instrumentation of the Requiem, and at the urging of the
publisher, he released the Requiem in an orchestral version in 1901.
With the bourgeois revolutions in Europe at the end of the 19th century,
society’s view of the omnipotence of the (Catholic) Church also changed. The fear of the
horrors of heavenly judgment—from which only the “Church, the sole source of salvation”
could offer protection—gradually faded. Above all, heaven has lost the horrors of
Purgatory. Accordingly, Fauré dispenses with the dramatic depiction of the
heavenly judgment, mentioning it only almost in passing.
It was to be a gentle Requiem, a lullaby of death. Fauré did not view death
as a painful experience, but rather as a welcome liberation, a yearning
for the afterlife.
“I have poured all my religious imagination into my Requiem
, which is permeated from beginning to end by a very human sense of faith
in eternal rest.” (Fauré)
His Requiem was also performed at his own funeral in 1924.
The concert program is rounded out with motets by Karl Jenkins (b. Feb. 17, 1944).