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Always too eager for the future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.
When I was 19, I had to remain for an entire month in my parents’ house, unable to go out or attend my university classes. From that period, which promised to be dull and melancholic, I nevertheless remember two experiences that affected me in lasting and valuable ways. One was reading the four volumes of The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell, which I still own today. I have never dared to reread it, for fear that the dazzling impression it left on me during that shadowy stage of my youth may fade.
But the other experience was perhaps even more striking—and unrepeatable, for reasons I will now explain. Among my vinyl records (the only format available back in 1971), I found a recording of Verdi’s Requiem, conducted live in Moscow by Igor Markevitch with the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra and the State Academy Choir. At that time, recordings came with a written insert containing information about the performance.
The session had taken place in 1960. Markevitch, a Ukrainian-Italian musician who had conducted the world’s finest orchestras, found himself facing a considerable obstacle. The issue was that the Requiem is, after all, a mass – its full name is Messa da Requiem—and Verdi had set to music the traditional liturgical text of the Catholic Mass for the dead, though today it is performed almost exclusively as a concert work in opera houses and auditoriums. Markevitch’s challenge was to explain to the choir – trained in strict atheism in the hermetically sealed Soviet empire – what this classic piece of medieval religious repertoire meant and how it should be interpreted. I especially treasure the explanation he offered them of the famous Dies Irae (Day of Wrath).
What I recount below comes from my memory, for unfortunately I did not keep the record, unlike Durrell’s Quartet. I transcribe what my mind has retained and, no doubt, processed over the decades since that distant time in Li