Requiem for a Hasid

In 1772, a child is born in Medzibuz, Ukraine. He is the son of a rabbi, a nephew of a rabbi, and a great grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, the iconic founder of the Hasidic movement, a reformative, pious, ultra-orthodox branch of Judaism. He will be raised with expectations of greatness but will struggle with formal education and wander the fields and streams surrounding him with rapt awe.

In 1845, a child is born in Pamiers, Ariege, in southern France. He will spend his first four years of life with a foster mother before being returned to his parents’ home. He will eventually be sent to school in Paris and will  grow up to become a church organist, a choir master, and a composer.

The child in Ukraine, Nachman is his name, will become a spiritual leader at age thirteen. Utterly consumed with God, by the age of eighteen he will have gathered a community of followers around him and be known as Reb Nachman – Reb, being the Hasidic name for a leader, somewhat different than a Rabbi, who has ecclesiastic judicial and educational authority but is not necessarily a communal leader.

The child in Paris, Gabriel Faure, will become enmeshed in the 19^th Century French system of church musicianship and conservatory life. He loves composing but can only do so in the summers, when he is away from his daily duties as an organist. He displays no religious fervor whatsoever.

Reb Nachman will continue developing his singular method of devotion and piety, stressing intimacy with God and careful attention to the ‘song of the weeds.’ “Know,” he said, “that every blade of grass has its own melody and the shepherd receives the melody they play on their flute from these weeds.”

 In 1887, unprompted by the death of anyone in particular, nor commissioned by the church, Faure began composing his Requiem Mass in D minor. “My Requiem wasn’t written for anything – for pleasure, if I may call it that!” He stated. At first, the Requiem featured five movements. He would add two more movements and tweak and expand the orchestration until 1901.

Reb Nachman said that the truth of the world is a song. Each soul has its own melody, but when the final day will come, we will all know that there was always only one song.

Faure’s love of the human voice, let alone his complete mastery of it, is evident in every bar of his Requiem. His vocal scoring is not angelic – it is higher than that – it is human. Jewish tradition teaches us that angels are fixed in their tasks and positions. They can never rise above their assigned duties. The human being, on the other hand, can rise from the very dirt and soar to the highest heavens. Faure proves it.

The singing voice, whether it be the voice of a bird or a human being, is a hidden instrument. It is totally internal and can never be seen nor touched by its possessor. It is as fragile as its host and has no physical existence outside of its host. It is also the only instrument that is truly ephemeral. Unlike a violin or a cello whose tone  can improve over a period of hundreds of years, the human voice begins to decay within 50 years of its use and dies out even before its host has returned their ashes to the earth.

Unlike any other instrument, the human voice can articulate words and, therefore, convey ideas and meanings not available to other, constructed instruments. This extraordinary gift also contains great danger because it is limited by the ability of the singer to stay out of the way of the words while fully expressing the feelings and emotions embedded within them. Physical, external instruments, on the other hand, are unencumbered by words. They are free to express a range of emotions and subtext not available to the singer.

The ephemeral nature of the living voice and its fragility, while seemingly great disadvantages, actually bear witness to God’s mystery and the presence of death as the underlying truth of our existence.

Right from the opening of Faure’s Requiem, in the Introit et Kyrie, we are given notice that this will not be a fire and brimstone exposition, nor will it be morose or trepidatious. Fear does not seem to be on Faure’s mind. Instead, Faure finds beauty in the presence of death. To be sure, there is disquieting movement beneath the choral score, but it serves more as subtext, rich texture, as self-evident complexity than the fear of death. In Faure’s own words: “It has been said that my Requiem does not express the fear of death and someone has called it a lullaby of death. But it is thus that I see death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than as a painful experience.”

Reb Nachman said that “The entire world is a very narrow bridge and the main thing is not to be afraid.” This statement has become very popular (I would say even over-used) in the contemporary Jewish world. I doubt that most who quote this phrase and sing it joyously are actually aware of its stunning paradoxical truth. I believe that the meaning of Reb Nachman’s statement is borne out by Faure’s Requiem, a composition that embraces death as the beautiful, ever-present foundation of our existence on this earth.

I have a terrible fear of heights. If the world is, indeed, nothing but a very narrow bridge, fear is the first thing I would feel. Since any bridge spans an abyss, why would I not tremble? Why would Reb Nachman draw our attention to the very thing that would cause us anxiety?

I believe that Reb Nachman wanted (and still wants) to awaken us from a stupor. We humans are constantly stumbling through life in a semi-conscious way, bombarded by external stimuli and internal noise.

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, the great Soto Zen Master, named the constant chatter echoing inside us ‘Mind Weeds:’ Cravings, fears, ideas, likes and dislikes, images and sounds – attachments that pulsate through our minds every waking moment of our lives. These mind weeds prevent us from seeing, hearing, and experiencing the actual miracle of reality: the eternal movement of all matter within the one, silent universal truth that is the ground of all existence. Empty of all noise, this silence is the source of all music, of wonderous being. This is the one melody Reb Nachman spoke of. This is the very music that Faure heard, experienced, lived and brought to our awareness with his Requiem.

Think of how music is utilized these days: seeping out from the innards of elevators, ushering us into stores, urging us to purchase merchandise or services. Once in the shopping area itself the music is there to keep us energetically moving, searching for more stuff to buy.

In the process of harnessing music to the money-making machine in which human beings have been transformed into ‘consumers’ (a vile, soulless noun replacing ‘citizen,’ or just ‘person’), music itself has become just another money-making scheme, packaged and piped into ‘genres’ that serve only as convenient ways to market a ‘product’ to an insatiable and restless public.

There are, of course, many who, in spite of all I have said, still listen to music for its own sake – for the emotional impact it carries; for the physical sensations it can arouse; for the intellectual excitement it can stir; for the memories it can evoke; for its transformative and healing power.

Removed from the commercial battlefield, sacred music stands as its own, unique form. Sacred music is liturgy-based and is meant to transport the religious practitioner, the listener, as well as the performer, to a plain beyond words and ritual itself – to a transcendent state of being beyond the material, beyond, even, ideas.

The difficulty, of course, is that human beings are too often attached to the very ideas they create and are endlessly bound to their own materiality. What should be transcendent becomes formalized and canonized. Faure spoke about this problem directly: “…As to my Requiem, perhaps I have also instinctively sought to escape from what is thought right and proper, after all the years of accompanying burial services on the organ! I know it all by heart. I wanted to write something different.”

For the past 40 years or so, whenever I’ve wanted to listen to a requiem, I’ve chosen Mozart’s and Verdi’s Requiems, both of which I love. Six weeks ago I began listening to Faure’s Requiem in D minor for no particular reason and I have not been able to stop listening to it multiple times, daily. As a matter of fact, it is the only music I have been listening to.

I had not heard Faure’s Requiem since my early teens, when my aunt, Suzanne, who sang in the Israel Philharmonic Chorus, introduced me to it. This renewed encounter with Faure’s Requiem has stunned me and has led me to reexamine my listening habits, as well as (what is for me) the undeniable connection between music and the divine.

I am by nature and vocation, both a musician and a religious person. By that I mean that I am a spiritual person who orders his experiences through a system, a context, that is a traditional, religious teaching and practice. I am a composer, a singer, and a rabbi.

So, why would a rabbi be so interested in Faure’s Requiem? Because truth is truth. While I may examine all that I encounter through the filter of my religious beliefs and teachings, the music I encounter, the art, the poetry, still affect me as they would any human being with a seeking mind and a thirsting soul. Christian, Jew, or agnostic, a person with a hearing heart cannot be confronted by Faure’s Requiem and remain unmoved.

What Faure achieves with his Requiem is something miraculous: through music, he gives voice to the intense insubstantiality of the human life. By that I mean to say that no matter how extraordinary any single human life may be, from a universal perspective it is not even a flicker, a pulse, a breath. It is this very contrast between joy and agony, hope and disappointment, pleasure and pain – indeed, the entire array of life’s experiences – and the cosmic vastness that is the context within which our lives are played out.

Faure lets his Requiem pulsate into being, rise and fall, soar, and come back down to earth again, disappearing like dew touched by the first rays of sunlight. All the intense beauty Faure unveils for us is over so swiftly as to leave us wondering what it is we have just experienced.

Faure’s Requiem is only 35 minutes long. His  use of the Requiem’s liturgy is paired down and his use of the orchestra is exquisitely contained and compact. Along with the orchestra and the chorus, Faure features only two soloists. In comparison, Verdi’s Requiem employs a symphonic orchestra, four soloists, a double chorus, and is ninety minutes long. Mozart uses a lush chambre orchestration with a mixed choir and four soloists. His Requiem is fifty minutes long.

Faure’s Requiem focuses on the human voice in relation to its surroundings. Faure speaks to the inherent beauty of life and the sounds that surround us, disturb us, and uplift us but, astoundingly, he seems to capture the impossible grace of death itself. Faure offers us the music of silence.

The great conductor, Sergiu Celibidache, says that “beauty is the bait that lures us to art, but beauty is not the goal. What really hides within beauty is truth.” Truth is what Faure offers us with his Requiem.

While the singers express the fear, anguish, awe, heartbreak, acceptance, and uplift of the human condition, Faure has the orchestra serve as the context within which the humans move on their journey from the beyond towards the beyond. The horns and the woodwinds make brief appearances. The organ is featured a couple of times, as is the harp, but it is the double basses, cellos and violas that are the featured instruments in Faure’s orchestration and he elicits the dark evocative power imbued within these instruments to a painfully beautiful effect. The violins rarely soar above their mid-range and even when that happens, Faure hands the high passages to a solo violin.

This, for me, is the most spiritual, sacred piece of music I know and as deceptively simple and short as it may seem, it is very difficult to perform well, which should come as no surprise since Faure reaches beyond the limits of music that can be played or sung. The piece reveals itself in the silences beyond his heavenly notes. Faure has left no place for the musicians to hide. Any mistake is magnified, any false sentiment becomes gaudy, almost sacrilegious.

Faure understood well that the human being can be a door, which, when opened, can let in the secrets of existence. Faure swung himself wide open and allowed God’s music to rush in. When the flow stopped, Faure shut the door and began assembling and ordering the flow that was to become his Requiem. Mostly, it seems as though Faure discarded the dross that is always present when the human being hears the divine voice and attaches their own human cleverness and concepts to it. What we have left for us is the bare minimum, which is to say – we are left with everything.

Watching a film of Sergiu Celibidache conducting the London Symphony Chorus in rehearsal for three days, in 1983, two words were repeated often: ‘humble,’ and ‘movement.’ This is a precise understanding of Faure – humility in the face of the tremendous nature of God, and movement through life towards death – NOT as a frightening reality, but as an exquisite tragedy that is always present. In other words, the music grows out of the mystery and keeps moving towards the mystery. What other attitude can be taken but humility?

“The entire world is a very narrow bridge and the main thing is not to be afraid.” Why should we not be afraid? A bridge is anchored at two opposite points in between which it spans an abyss. The Prophet Isaiah, quoted in the Sanctus, states: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts, the entire earth is filled with God’s glory.” The bridge, therefore, is anchored in God on one end and anchored in God on the other end. In between, the bridge spans God and is surrounded by God – this is the essence of what Isaiah states. Reb Nachman is aware that such consciousness is very hard to come by. We, humans, are constantly worried, stuck in our corporeality, afraid of the unknown, terrified of our constant movement towards death. Reb Nachman wants us to see Isaiah’s words and transcend our fears. Faure does precisely that with his music.

Celibidache speaks of transcending the material. For him, that is the essence of creativity. Faure transcends the material with his Requiem, and he does so using the very materiality of the singers and the instruments as the means of transcendence. One almost gets the feeling that the entire ensemble evanesces as they perform the requiem.

For me, the performance that best captures this transcendence is the YouTube recording of the Ensemble Orchestral de Paris at the Festival de Saint Denis, in 2010. From the conducting of Laurence Equilbey – exquisitely balanced and passionately modest, to the singing of David Bizic, Baritone, and Karina Gauvin, Soprano. Gauvin has a slightly shaky start but settles into the Pie Jesu with intense refinement. The orchestra is excellent and never overpowers the choir, which is absolutely wonderful.

The worst offense one can commit while performing the Requiem, in my opinion, is over-singing and over-playing. Singing is the heart of the matter and if the singing is too showy, too stiff, or over-articulated, and the orchestra is competing for attention, the entire enterprise collapses. There are conductors who unfortunately render the Requiem in a manner way too big, too grandiose, too lush. In many cases, while both the orchestra and the choir may be first-rate, the orchestra is constantly overpowering the choir. These conductors, too often, impose over-dramatic dynamics which draw attention to themselves instead of allowing Faure’s profound music to wash over us. In effect, by doing so, such interpretations miss the whole point Faure is making with his Requiem.

Which brings me back to Reb Nachman. The pinnacle of Reb Nachman’s teaching is his masterpiece, The Seven Beggers, told during a wedding celebration in 1809, barely a year before his death. Over a period of seven days, Reb Nachman told the assembled guests a story that contains a story within it, in which seven stories are imbedded, each with, at least, one story embedded within them. He never told the guests the seventh chapter. The Seventh day, he said, is yet to come.

Day three is the story of the Heart of The World. The source of life, says Reb Nachman, comes from a spring that flows from a rock on the top of a mountain, standing at one end of the world. Facing it, on the other end of the world, stands the heart of the world, and the heart of the world yearns for the spring. If, God forbid, the heart of the world would not be able to see the spring flowing from the rock – it would die, and if the heart of the world would die – so would the entire world.

The spring yearns for the heart of the world and has everything it needs except for the gift of time, which the heart of the world must offer it by day’s end.

“…Now, there is a True Person of Loving-Kindness who searches the earth for mercy and gathers threads of compassion and weaves them into a song which is then handed to the heart of the world. At day’s end, the heart of the world offers the song to the spring on the mountain and gives it the gift of time and the world can go on for another day.”

Gabriel Faure’s Requiem is the gift of the song offered by the heart of the world to the spring flowing from the rock at the top of the mountain. Listen to the Requiem and as you hear the song of the world pulsating gently and insistently in the last movement, In Paradisum, you will know that the world will go on for one more day.

Reb Nachman said that the world thinks that when Messiah will come there will be no more death, and the world is wrong. When Messiah comes, Messiah, too, will die. Death, however, will no longer be the death we now know. In Paradisum is the sound life makes as it leaves the conscious mind. It is the sound of eternal wavelets emanating outward in the setting sun. There is no resistance here, no fear or even sorrow. There is only the beauty of movement towards the beyond – the quest of all true art and all true religion.