Orchestre des Champs-Élysées | Mozart

Shrouded in the legend of the "grey man" who came knocking at the door of Mozart's home, Mozart's Requiem is without doubt the most famous Mass for the dead in the history of music. But it is also a timeless masterpiece, in which Mozart's dramatic genius is placed at the service of the highest spirituality.

Composed in 1791 and left unfinished, Mozart's Requiem is undoubtedly one of the scores that has acquired almost legendary status. Its testamentary quality, but also the mysterious circumstances of its composition, have been the subject of a thousand speculations and variations, imbuing the work with tragic darkness. Built stone by stone by the theatre, literature and the cinema, the legend of the Requiem has forged the image of a Mozart working relentlessly, until his last breath, on a work felt as a supernatural call and testifying to the vibrant intensity of his faith. Hundreds of pages of commentary would not exhaust the riches of a score written in the reputedly tragic key of D minor. The Dies Irae thunders with choral power, enhanced by dramatic tremolos in the orchestra; the Confutatis dazzles with its harmonic audacity; the Lacrimosa, a sad lullaby, evokes floods of tears in an unparalleled manner... At times grave and archaic, at other times peppered with operatic echoes evoking Zoroaster or the Queen of the Night, the Requiem remains an unprecedented score, and one of the great milestones in the history of music.