On Singing the Mozart Requiem

I’ve been a member of my church choir for fifteen years. I joined almost immediately upon joining the church. I had a lot of lost singing time to make up, since I had not attended any church at all for the previous 27 years, and had not sung in a choir since high school. This week, my beloved choir director said his goodbyes for greater vocational challenges elsewhere. It’s been difficult to see him go, so soon after that other more permanent goodbye. We sang a choral Evensong last Sunday, and it’s caused me to remember the moment when I stopped fearing death.

We used to have an annual concert in which we performed a major work from the choral repertoire. Generally, I’ve always liked to stand front and center when we sing, because I love watching Keith, my director, and want to be where the action is. During concerts, though, he would generally tell us where he wanted us to be, and the year we sang the Mozart Requiem I was standing only one person removed from the columbarium.

It was the afternoon prior to the concert, and we were rehearsing. Most of the lights in the nave were off, but there was light coming through the stained glass windows, and there was some activity out there in the nave while we rehearsed, as people prepared the seating and post-concert reception area. I don’t remember which movement we were rehearsing, but I began to feel the presence of the columbarium near me, pulling my attention to it as Keith worked with the choir and the bustle of life continued around me. It came into my consciousness that yes, those were the remains of dead people right over there next to me, people who had once been alive and moving around this space, talking and laughing and singing, just as we were doing now, maybe even gossiping or bitching about each other, activities that too enjoy much current popularity.

I realized I was singing for them, because they had no voice, and what I was singing was written centuries ago by someone who was also dead and had no voice, written expressly for singing by us, the living, for them, the dead. And I knew in that moment that some day, I’d be dead and this piece would be sung again, for me, because I would have no voice, by people who might not yet live, but whether they knew it or not, or knew of my existence on this earth, they’d be singing it for me. At that moment the dividing line between life and death fell away, the past and the future and indeed time itself fell away, and there was no difference between me and the people whose remains were in the columbarium. At that moment, there was nothing at all left to fear in life or death.

I retained that feeling through the concert later that afternoon. I can call it up when I need and want to, though I’m sorry to report that it did not make me always and forever fearless—I’m still working on that. The music these past fifteen years has been a priceless gift, but that epiphany is probably the one I was seeking when I first stumbled into St. Mark’s.