Seeking a Global Voice: Requiems Sacred and Secular

THOMAS MAY

Although it may have been prompted by the loss of his parents, Gabriel Fauré’s beloved setting of the Requiem was not created to fulfill a specific commission. To contemporaries who perceived his Requiem as a gentle “lullaby of death,” he responded: “But that is how I see death: as a happy deliverance, a yearning for the happiness of the beyond, rather than as a distressing transition.”

Fauré began composing the Requiem in 1887 and later expanded it to seven movements whose structural similarity to Brahms’s A German Requiem, which likewise calls for two soloists, has been widely noted. The piece also exists in versions for a modest chamber orchestra and for more-expanded instrumental forces.

Fauré famously opted to exclude the long Dies irae sequence (except for its final two lines, the Pie Jesu), as well as the Benedictus. The Dies irae dominates Verdi’s Requiem, for example, where it even becomes an epic inside the epic, a musical equivalent to Michelangelo’s Last Judgment fresco. At the same time, he included the Libera me (so did Verdi) and, more unusually, In Paradisum, a prayer sung after the Requiem Mass has ended as the choir accompanies the body on its way to burial. (Reena Esmail concludes with this prayer as well, interweaving it with O’Daly’s poem “The Dream of the Waterfall.”)

The Requiem opens in D minor, low in the register, with music that recurs near the end of the Agnus Dei. But far from a feeling of somber, oppressive gloom, Fauré elicits a calm serenity that sets the tone for the entire work. His carefully planned structure places the Pie Jesu at the center; this is the only movement for solo soprano (originally intended for boy soprano per ecclesiastical custom). The chorus-only movements frame the Requiem and additionally surround the pair of movements with solo baritone.

Fauré’s mastery of supple French melody graces the score throughout. At times this results in a nouveau chant-like e ffect; at others, it refracts the melodic line through subtly shifting harmonic tints. Though it omits the Sequence as such, the Requiem make a reference to the “Dies irae,” the Day of Judgment, in the Libera me, and in this movement Fauré appropriately introduces an element of tension—sonically and rhythmically—that provides a foil to the tranquility and beatific arpeggios elsewhere. He thus prepares the way for the final movement’s consoling vision, where the music’s transition to D major leads us, along with those for whom the prayer is o ffered, into Paradise.

Over the past half-decade, Los Angeles Master Chorale audiences have encountered several examples of the trailblazing collaborations between Indian and Western instrumentalists and singers that are a signature of Reena Esmail’s work. Imaginative syntheses of classical Hindustani tradition with Western idioms abound in her rapidly growing catalogue of choral, orchestral, and chamber compositions. At the same time, they reflect her identity as a woman from a diasporic Indian family who was raised in Los Angeles.

Esmail, who is at the midpoint of her tenure as Swan Family Artist-in-Residence, has emerged as one of the most-sought-after young American composers. This evening’s world premiere represents the last in a staggering list of 16 new works she was commissioned to write in 2022 alone (along with such other large-scale compositions as a new violin concerto reflecting on the ancient paradigm of the five elements and a cantata celebrating 100 years of women’s suffrage).

With her widely performed choral-orchestral work Love Between Us: Prayers for Unity, Esmail remolded the format of the oratorio according to concerns we face today. Malhaar: A Requiem for Water similarly brings a contemporary, secular perspective to one of the most tradition-laden sacred music genres in the choral literature.

But the occasion to write the requiem led her to take a new path. Earlier works use the fusion of Indian and Western language that Esmail has painstakingly created and built over years to explore intersections between these cultures. With Malhaar, she explains, “I wanted to use this multicultural instrument as a global voice to tell a story about something that is elemental to all of us.”

When she was initially considering what form the commission should take, Esmail was prompted by a steady barrage of news stories on the drought to turn her attention to the topic of the disappearance of water. “As a composer, I’m always thinking: What are we not seeing that needs some resonance around it right now?” Another impetus was her encounter with Richard Powers’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory. In his deeply involving story of humanity’s alienation from nature, Powers uses the immense resources of his narrative art to convey the urgent need for a radical reawakening of empathy with the living world beyond ourselves. “The facts alone are not going to move you to do anything, but a story, a work of art, does have that impact,” Esmail observes.

Esmail also chanced upon a reading by the poet William O’Daly (who is especially known for his translations of Pablo Neruda and also happens to be lead writer for the California Water Plan). This discovery inspired her to compile a libretto around the water theme by interweaving contemporary poetry—culled from O'Daly's books The New Gods and Water Ways—with ancient Latin texts from the Requiem Mass and Hindi paraphrases.

Malhaar refers to a family of raags associated with the invocation of powerful rain. In the trajectory of the work’s seven movements, various versions of Malhaar appear and both are associated with the beckoning of water in this world and “serve as a metaphorical access point to the ‘heavens’ in the next world,” Esmail explains. Her score calls for mixed Western chorus and two soloists (soprano Graycen Gardner and tenor Adam Faruqi) drawn from the Master Chorale along with guest Hindustani vocalist Saili Oak, a frequent collaborator; they are accompanied by Western percussionist Theresa Dimond and tabla soloist Abhiman Kaushal.

The first two movements reverse the usual order of a sacred Requiem by invoking the Kyrie at the outset, which in turn is combined with a Hindi prayer and the provocative lyrical reflection by Wendell Berry. Malhaar ’s only reference to the cataclysmic Dies irae sequence comes in the fourth movement, which Esmail describes as the heart and center of the piece: the Lacrimosa incorporates the image of water as human tears and is deftly intertwined with O’Daly’s plaintive poem and a Hindi text.

Overall, Esmail hopes to convey through Malhaar “both mourning for the water that we have lost and an invitation for water to return. To acknowledge the loss is so painful, but we can still hold out hope that if we change our relationship to the earth, we might beckon the rain back.”