Requiem

In recent years, even decades, it has become a common practice to perform certain oratorios fully or semi-staged. After Messiah and Matthäus-Passion, nothing could be more suitable to be next in this line than Giuseppe Verdi's Requiem, which is claimed by many, half-seriously, but certainly aptly, to be their “favourite opera”. While in Verdi’s time sacred spaces ingrained in everyday life were home to these masses for the dead – even though the composer himself conducted his work at La Scala and then for years at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, proving he was not opposed to making a theatre the space for his piece filled with operatic forms –, today, the greatest works of this genre are largely confined to concert halls brimming with light. In the OPERA’s production, Requiem is freed from the captivity of music stands and is displayed in all its human, morbid dread-filled drama. Ádám Tulassay’s staging brings Verdi’s piece back to the scene of our everyday lives: in these sombre, big-city surroundings, it showcases the big-city man’s relationship with mortality.