Mozart’s music is so powerful, it attracted singers from as far as Colombia. Veronica Stivala goes behind the scenes of St Paul Choral Society’s very international concert.
When was the last time you travelled to celebrate a dead man’s birthday? For many choristers from across the world, that would have been last year. You see, 2016 was a big year for Mozart, one in which both his 260th birthday, as well as the 225th anniversary of his death, were marked. And choristers from as far as Colombia joined in the celebratory local activities.
Along with the rest of the world, one choir in Malta celebrated too, with a concert of one of the genius musician’s greatest compositions: The Requiem in D Minor (KV626). For its biannual grand concert, the St Paul Choral Society (SPCS) performed the hauntingly beautiful concert late last year, first at St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta, and then at the Chapel of the Divine Mercy in San Pawl tat-Tarġa. And for this special concert, the SPCS were joined by five choristers from Austria, Germany and Munich. How did this all come about?
When 14 members of the St Paul Choral Society took part in the Sing mit! Festival in Vienna last July, a number of members of other choirs showed interest in taking part in the SPCS’s own performance of the Mozart Requiem in Malta, explains founder and choir director Hugo Agius Muscat. True to their word, an alto and a soprano from Austria (Ruth Pieringer and Renate Nikles) and two sopranos from Munich (Ruth Feller and Konstanze Erdmann) kept in regular contact, and eventually asked Agius Muscat whether they could indeed travel to Malta and sing with his choir.
“Having heard them sing in Vienna at St Stephen’s Cathedral, I knew I was on safe ground encouraging them to join in,” he confides. The only conditions he laid down were that they should attend the final three rehearsals, and that they should sing using Ecclesiastical Latin, as the choir is used to, rather than Germanic Latin. To make the visit to Malta more feasible, the choir director clustered the final rehearsals as close to the performance as possible, and also prepared and sent a guide on Ecclesiastical Latin.
Words cannot do Mozart’s music justice, but the power that it has to move people is surely testament to his genius
When the visitors arrived, “the rapport already built in Austria served us in good stead, for they blended seamlessly into the choir, getting on well not only musically but also socially,” recalls Agius Muscat.
Of Dora Beatriz Salazar, a music teacher from Colombia, Agius Muscat says: “She joined the choir for just a few months. But this was long enough for her to leave an indelible mark thanks to her friendly disposition and joie de vivre.”
Mozart’s music has clearly shown its strength, well beyond the composer’s death. As Denis Arnold put it so aptly in The New Oxford Companion to Music, Mozart’s music is perhaps more widely loved and respected than that of any other composer:
“This is due to the opposing sides of his nature: his inborn musical ability, which has scarcely been equalled and which enabled him to solve problems with enviable ease; and his sensitivity to the music of other men, which meant that wherever he travelled in Europe he was strongly affected by local taste.
“These two traits gave him a unique mixture of individuality and universality. He wrote in virtually every genre known to him – expert in the composition of entertainment music, and yet also composing profound works which reveal a somber, almost fatalistic, nature. Conversely, his lighter pieces often reveal a deeper element, while his most serious works rarely fail to delight as well as move the listener.”
Konstanze Erdmann, from Munich, confides how she has a soft spot for the Mozart Requiem: “It was one of my father’s preferred requiems together with the Brahms requiem and Verdi requiem,” she notes, adding that she used to listen to it when she was a child. She sang it for the first time in 2006 in Vienna and, in her words; “I always love to sing it, when I get the chance to do so. For me, it’s one of the most beautiful pieces of music that exists.”
Speaking about her experience singing with the Maltese choir, she said: “It was a wonderful experience. Everybody was very kind. The rehearsals and the concert at St John’s were very impressive. Hugo is a good conductor, so it was easy for us to join, even at this late point of the rehearsals. If the SPCS would invite us again, there’s no doubt that we would take the next plane out to get to Malta.”
Perhaps words cannot do Mozart’s music justice, but the power that it has to move people is surely testament to his genius.