THE VERDI REQUIEM or: What happens when a doubter asks the biggest questions

First a note: this text represents, as always, the very personal opinion of Christiane Berker. This time it is a little different than usual – and I ask for your understanding if it becomes a bit quieter than usual at one point.

There are years that demand more from you than others. And there is music that appears exactly when you need it. A piece of music was planned since August 2025, then, in 2026, the meaning of "one of the concerts in the anniversary year" changed to a personal tribute.

The Immling Festival has lost three people this year, without whom much of what has emerged on this hill would not have come to be. Angelika Weiss-Greither was a supporter and friend. Toni Meggle, a sponsor and friend of the festival, who accompanied Immling with conviction and generosity – one of those personalities that cannot be replaced, only missed. And Hubert von Kerssenbrock, father of Cornelia and Verena von Kerssenbrock – and thus, if one may put it this way, also the father of a considerable part of what happens musically and scenically on this hill. Losses like these are not found in program books. They are carried within.

One can find words about losses – beautiful, thoughtful, dignified words. But sometimes words are not enough. Sometimes you need music. And sometimes you need exactly the right music.
The Verdi Requiem is exactly that.

First the basics – for all those who dare to ask
A requiem, in case you really wanted to look it up and then left it: This is the mass for the dead of the Catholic Church. A prayer for the soul of the deceased, set to music in countless variations, from Mozart to Brahms. The word comes from the first Latin sentence: "Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine" – "Grant them eternal rest, O Lord." Sounds simple. It is not. Especially not with Verdi.

For Giuseppe Verdi – whom you know as the man behind Rigoletto, La Traviata, Otello, and Falstaff – was what one might kindly call a "very doubtful believer." His wife Giuseppina once wrote to a friend that this rascal claimed with calm persistence not to be a staunch atheist, but only a very doubtful believer. And this very man wrote one of the most monumental religious works in the entire history of music. That alone is already a story.

How it came to be – an opera in three acts
Act One: Rossini dies.
In 1868, the music world loses Gioachino Rossini, the creator of The Barber of Seville, and Verdi has an idea: a joint requiem, twelve of the most significant composers of Italy, each one movement, a collective monument. Verdi takes the last movement – the "Libera me," "Deliver me, O Lord, from eternal death." The project fails due to egos, bureaucracy, and the conductor Mariani's lack of energy. The scores go into the drawer. Only in 1988 is the Messa per Rossini premiered in Stuttgart – almost one hundred and twenty years too late.

Act Two: Manzoni dies.
On May 22, 1873, Alessandro Manzoni, Italy's most significant poet, author of "The Betrothed" (I Promessi Sposi) – a novel that means roughly the same for Italian literature as Goethe's Faust does for German – dies. For Verdi, Manzoni is much more than a poet: a saint in human form, a moral conscience of the nation, a man of the Risorgimento. When Manzoni dies, Verdi avoids the crowds at the funeral and instead stands alone at his grave a week later. And decides to open the drawer again.

The "Libera me" becomes the seed. Verdi travels to Paris and composes the entire requiem during the summer and autumn months of 1873. He studies, as one hears, the requiems of Mozart, Cherubini, and Berlioz. Then he does something completely different.

Act Three: The world premiere.
On May 22, 1874 – exactly one year after Manzoni's death, to the day – the work is performed for the first time in the Church of San Marco in Milan. Verdi himself conducts. The choir consists of one hundred and twenty singers, the orchestra one hundred musicians. It is, as a critic writes, "a European cultural event." Three days later, the repeat at La Scala, then a real tour: Paris, London, Vienna, with Verdi always at the podium.

"Opera in church garb" – and why that is the greatest compliment
Of course, the criticism did not go unnoticed. There were objections – of course there were objections. The 19th century loved fundamental debates. "True" church music, according to the conservatives, should contain "nothing unholy, nothing worldly, nothing theatrical." What Verdi delivered was – well. All of that.

Especially piquant: The conductor Hans von Bülow wrote a devastating critique of the requiem without having heard it, without having seen the score. He simply jumped on the bandwagon of the outraged and casually called it what has since been meant as a pejorative and understood as a compliment: Opera in church garb.
Verdi was furious. And in doing so, he received the most apt praise of his life.

Johannes Brahms, in any case – the Protestant, the North German, the man of the German Requiem, thus the most unlikely advocate for Verdi – took von Bülow aside. The conductor had to apologize to Verdi in writing. And Giuseppina, Verdi's wife, perhaps articulated the wisest thing ever said about this work: A man like Verdi must also compose like Verdi – that is, according to his feelings, according to his understanding of the texts. The religious spirit and the works that testify to it must bear the stamp of their time and reveal the characteristics of the individual.

Listen to the Dies Irae – The Day of Judgment – and judge for yourself. Eight trumpets, four of them from afar, from different directions: Verdi wanted the Last Judgment to sound as if it were really coming from all directions at once. It works. Even without faith. Even without a church pew.

And then the Lacrimosa – "The day of tears" – for which Verdi, by the way, drew on a lament from his own opera Don Carlos: a melody that unfolds like grief itself. The Agnus Dei, in which soprano and mezzo-soprano sing in pure octaves, as if the singing came from another world. And the Libera Me at the end – that movement with which Verdi begins and with which he ends. An arc that spans the entire composition.

The whole lasts about 85 minutes, without a break. You listen through it. You don't get a chance to think away in between.

Theresienstadt – or: what this work can really do
Here I must tell you something that I discovered while reflecting on this requiem and that has not left me.

Between 1943 and 1944, the Verdi Requiem was performed about sixteen times in the concentration camp Theresienstadt. The Jewish conductor Rafael Schächter led the rehearsals with fellow prisoners – people who knew what was happening around them and what could be coming for them. At the last performance, Adolf Eichmann and high-ranking SS officers were in the audience. The prisoners sang the "Libera me" – "Deliver me, O Lord" – directly into their faces.

Verdi had written the requiem for a dead poet. A doubter for a saint. And it became what it had always been, without Verdi knowing it: a work that asserts dignity under all circumstances.
This is not a footnote. This is what music is for.

Georgia – and a conductor who knows what she conducts
And then there is this story that shows why the performance of this requiem in Immling is not just any performance.
Shortly after the death of her father Hubert von Kerssenbrock, Cornelia von Kerssenbrock conducted the Verdi Requiem in Georgia. Imagine that: this work, which literally deals with farewell, fear, and letting go, shortly after the most personal loss. I don't know how one does that. I only know that there are people who find a power in music that goes beyond themselves.

That the performance took place at all was by no means a matter of course: In Georgia, a deeply Orthodox Christian country, the patriarch Kyrill had died. And when a patriarch dies there, the country comes to a standstill. Public events? Unthinkable. Music? Impossible. That the performance still took place has something that I can only describe as: consistent.

A requiem that hardly sounds – and then does sound. A conductor who carries the work of other mourners in the midst of her own grief. The "Libera me" as the last movement: "Deliver me, O Lord, from eternal death."

Why you should be there
This sentence comes to me easier and harder at the same time.
Easier because the answer is so simple: The Verdi Requiem is one of the greatest works ever written. Period.
Harder because I want to tell you that this performance carries more than notes. It carries the memory of Toni Meggle and Hubert von Kerssenbrock. It carries the story of a conductor who knows what she conducts. And it carries thirty years of a festival that has always been strongest when it had something to say.

Verdi wrote the requiem for a man he revered like a saint. He himself was not a believer – at least not a comfortable one. But he believed in humanity. And this requiem is his proof: loud where it must be loud, quiet where silence is the only thing left.

It does not comfort by saying that everything will be fine. It comforts by taking us seriously. With all that it means.

We will see each other on the hill.
Sincerely
Your Christiane Berker