FinishMySong Blog

As strange as it sounds, Bradford Festival Choral Society are next month doing an open 'Come & Sing' evening to perform the Requiem by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Don't get me wrong, choirs do try to attract new singers and new audiences by doing these sing-a-long nights quite often but it's usually something a bit less sombre than a mass for the dead that gets performed on these evenings, such as Handel's Messiah.


In any case, everyone is invited to join BFCS on Saturday June 24th at Victoria Hall in Saltaire to perform this great work. What would normally happen is that there'll be a rehearsal during the daytime to get people used to the conductor's methods and then after a short break the performance will go ahead in the evening. It is the norm that those who volunteer to sing will already know the work (and the part of their vocal range) well enough to just get up and do it. I presume this will be the case here : the only catch is that it costs £10 per person to get involved. It does make me wonder why choirs charge so much for people to join in with these kinds of events and it certainly is no wonder that they then struggle to keep numbers up for these and the rest of their regular season, but then this is partly because of the lack of funding available to this kind of organisation.

You may be interested to know that the portrayal of the situation surrounding the composition of Mozart's Requiem on the 1984 film Amadeus (originally written for the stage by Peter Shaffer) was exaggerated and altered but not altogether far fetched. Rather than the mass being commissioned by Antonio Salieri, as the play would suggest, it was actually Count Walsegg zu Stuppach who wished to pass the work off as his own and hired a servant to dress in black to organise the commission from Mozart. And, according to some sources, Mozart did have a premonition of his own death around this time and believed that he was writing his own requiem mass. In reality, Stuppach wanted the world to believe that he had written it for his wife who had died some years earlier - he was known in later years to have claimed authorship to many works that were actually commissioned anonymously from professional composers.

Tchernaya had this to say about the Mozart Requiem :

"This work was, indeed, close to [Mozart's] dramatic music in character: magnificent choruses and solo episodes corresponded least of all to the dogmatic themes of the church. This was an expression of real human feeling, a tragic premonition of death, of the unfathomable depths of human suffering, and yet also of the miraculous power of hope and love for humankind that permeated the whole of Mozart's work...

[It] is closely connected with the remarkable choral tradition of the German classical composers of the first half of the 18th Century... Particularly close to them are such movements as the Kyrie, written in the form of a double fugue on an austere theme in the old style."

More details about this event and any other queries regarding Bradford Festival Choral Society can be sought by emailing bradfordfestivalchoralsociety@googlemail.com