Duruflé Requiem

The village choral society is bravely attempting the Duruflé Requiem, in a programme that also includes the four Handel Coronation Anthems. The Handel can be quickly passed over, for about the only musically interesting bits are the occasional hemiolas, Handel being a composer, or should I say having been a composer, who wrote far, far too much. GF's greatest sin, other than that of giving far too many top Ds (or worse) to basses, was to bequeath a certain way of writing hymn tunes to a myriad amateur hymn-tune writers, mainly from Yorkshire or Wales, with which we are still saddled in some quires and places where they sing. ('Ee, we allus sing Albert Snatterthwaite's tune for While Shepherds Watched 'ere. The tune come into 'is 'ead when 'e were muckin' out t'pigs, Albert used to say. He said it were Divine Intervention after he'd bin to see t'Halifax Choral do Messiah. He din't know nowt about music, Albert din't, but that din't stop 'im thinkin' up' that tune. Choirmaster rit it owt forrim, and wim sung it air since. Just at Christmas, like.')

But that is by the by.

The Duruflé is a rather different animal, ball-game, or kettle of fish, though. It is always a surprise to a choir when orchestra or organ get involved, usually at dress rehearsal, and launch into what sounds like a completely different work. A whole choral society's collective hair has been known to turn white in the space of 20 minutes.

Three skills are required of a choir person attempting this work -

1) the ability to count (though only up to nine)

2) the ability, and the desire, to see the conductor

3) the ability to go selectively deaf

I would add a fourth skill - sight-reading - but for some reason amateur groups have always placed sight-reading skills (or even being in possession of a usable voice) well down in the table of priorities, far below an aptitude for chair-stacking, tea-brewing or being on a Committee. And as for an ability to count, see the conductor or blank out disruptive aural influences, well, we didn't expect to have to work when we joined this choir, did we Mildred?

Mind you, if everybody in a choral society was an expert sight-reader the number of rehearsals needed for the next concert could be counted on the thumbs of one hand, and that would destroy the whole point of a local choral society, which is primarily social.

Duruflé's big mistake was to write his Requiem in Latin. It is a fact well known that no English person is capable, without years of tuition, of singing in Latin, especially if he (or she) learned about puellae in herba longa with pueri and that old viperas, which used to give us such delight in 2A when viperas was pronounced in the classic English tradition. The English tradition is not the tradition of church Latin, as Pope Pius X had to remind the unruly French in about 19-dot. Duruflé may have taken notice, but generations of English choral societies have carried on singing per-pet-chewer without benefit of clergy.

Still - and this is the unanswerable argument of your average choral society - the audience won't know any different.

But it's just such a shame for Duruflé, or Do Roughly, as I shall fondly think of him henceforth.

PS

Years ago I was drafted in at the final rehearsal to augment the basses in what was predominantly a school performance of Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, a work which I had not sung before and have not since, more's the pity. There was grudging respect from a few young 'erberts when I, an old git even then by their standards, managed the Hebrew text and complex rhythms at sight. albeit with most of my fingers crossed.

On that occasion the choir was well prepared, but the organist wasn't, and I think he must have been horrified at the complexity of the organ part, which he hadn't bothered to look at beforehand, being a teacher and therefore omniscient. The only things I remember about the concert is a splendid performance by a young alto soloist which rescued a most unholy mess-up, and falling gratefully into the pub-next-the-church afterwards in order to obliterate all other memories.