Andrew Lloyd Webber is world-famous as the composer of the musicals Cats and The Phantom of the Opera, but his Requiem has also achieved international acclaim. Winner of a Grammy Award, this grand-sounding masterpiece of contemporary classical music, written in 1985, is dedicated to the memory of Webber's late father. The recording of a concert by the Münchner Rundfunkorchester on June 15, 2023, a tribute to the British composer who celebrated his 75th birthday in March 2023, is now presented on CD by BR-KLASSIK. This live recording from the Herz-Jesu Church in Munich features the Bavarian Radio Chorus accompanied by a select ensemble of soloists, under the baton of principal guest conductor Patrick Hahn. There was much surprise when Andrew Lloyd Webber presented his Requiem to the public in 1985. Although classical composers had repeatedly ventured into the spheres of the so-called "light muse", hardly any path led in the other direction – from musicals or operettas to the sublime heights of sacred music.
The fact that a composer like Franz von Suppé also wrote a requiem as well as operettas is a rarity. Lloyd Webber's career in the "serious" genre, however, was laid in his cradle: his father, William Lloyd Webber (1914-1982), had worked his way up from humble beginnings to become one of the leading church musicians of his day. He encouraged the classical training of his sons Andrew (b. 1948) and Julian (b. 1951), an excellent cellist. Andrew found his niche in the entertainment industry. His song "Try it and see", written for the 1969 Eurovision Song Contest, was not yet a hit, but from a pop cantata he developed his first successful piece Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1968), and from the concept album Jesus Christ Superstar, in which "Try it and see" also found a new home, he created the rock musical of the same name (1971). With Evita (1976), Cats (1981), Starlight Express (1984) and The Phantom of the Opera (1986), Lloyd Webber repeatedly demonstrated his flair for contemporary material that lent itself to a new kind of treatment and appealed to a wide audience. By the mid-1980s, he was the most commercially successful composer of musicals. As Requiem Masses had been abolished in Anglican England since the Reformation, the composer did not have to consider liturgical functionality or ecclesiastical suitability. Verdi had demonstrated that the texts of the Latin Requiem Mass provided an excellent model for grand opera. And Lloyd Webber found inspiration for the lyrical dimension with hit potential in composers such as Gabriel Fauré.
The texts of the Requiem were rearranged with a sense of dramaturgy. The repeated insertion of the pithy lines "Requiem aeternam" and "Dies irae" gave them a fundamental, leitmotif-like character. The theatrical potential of the sequence ("Dies irae") was expanded, as it had been with Verdi, into a kaleidoscope of human emotions in the face of death and the Last Judgement.
In a poll conducted by BBC Radio 4 a few years ago, listeners voted Barber’s Adagio for Strings the “saddest piece in the world”. There is no doubt that its broad musical lines have an elegiac, almost religious tone – something the composer himself emphasised in the choral version, written as an Agnus Dei. However, the Adagio’s association with farewell and mourning was not intended by Barber, who conceived of his work as purely instrumental. It has however been used on repeated occasions to mark the deaths of prominent Americans, including Alfred Einstein, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy. As funeral music, the Adagio has also been a feature of several films since the 1980s, and two lines of tradition have emerged. On the one hand, the Adagio is often associated with the death of a main character, as in the final transfiguration of the Elephant Man in David Lynch’s film of the same name (1980) or, in a light-hearted alienation of the theme, in The Fabulous World of Amélie (2001), where the heroine imagines her own death being televised. On the other hand, the austere serenity of the Adagio is contrasted with images of violence and suffering, most emphatically in Oliver Stone’s anti-war film Platoon (1986). All these traditions came together in the days after September 11, 2001, when Barber’s Adagio was played over and over again by American radio and television stations – both as a tribute to the victims of the attacks and as a musical expression of American patriotism. Particularly memorable was the live performance on September 15, 2001, when the American conductor Leonard Slatkin conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Last Night of the Proms in London, leaving the hushed audience deeply moved. Thanks to its melancholic yet comforting sound, the Adagio for Strings was often the piece of choice internationally during the Covid-19 pandemic to commemorate the many victims – online or “open air”, on radio and television, and at concerts and other events.
