The Requiem Boxed Set

Yesterday Jailbird Jones made Mardi Gras dinner for Richard Bonomo, Kathbert, and me: Cajun meatloaf! He said it was the Holy Trinity of red, green, and black peppers that made it so tasty and spicy. Then he attempted to open the bottle of white wine I had contributed to the dinner with a corkscrew, but it wasn’t working… and then Kathbert realized it was a screw top! Since the cap now had a hole right in the center, we had to finish the bottle that night. What a Mardi Gras chore, right?

Since today is Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent, it seems appropriate to think about the Requiem Mass. Many composers have written one, but Mozart’s seems particularly moving, in part because he knew he was in some sense writing it for himself. That same immediacy also colors Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, which he wrote when he was dying at the age of 28 (makes Mozart seem like a paragon of longevity), and The Consolation of Philosophy, which Boethius wrote in good health, but as he languished in prison, knowing he would soon be tortured to death.

While it may seem like the Requiem Mass is no laughing matter, I can’t help thinking the following true story is kind of funny: years ago Tiffy and I were in a record store, waiting for the grumpy proprietor to ring up our purchases, and the patron ahead of us in line was demanding that he produce the Requiem Boxed Set. Tiffy and I looked at each other in bemusement, and apparently Charles was just as confused because he said he had never heard of the Requiem Boxed Set. At that, the gentleman ahead of us grew annoyed, since Charles had a well-deserved reputation for knowing every obscure classical recording ever made, and he said, “It has all the requiems on it! It has the Bach Requiem and the Beethoven Requiem-“

At this point Charles interrupted to inform the gentleman that Bach never wrote a Requiem Mass. This answer did not please the gentleman, who ranted on for a few minutes about how this boxed set contained ALL the requiems, and his friend had told him all about it, but he eventually saw that even Charles is incapable of causing something to materialize that doesn’t actually exist, so he left in a huff. Since Tiffy and I had long since won Charles’ grudging respect with our encyclopedic knowledge of Baroque music (and later stuff too, in Tiffy’s case), he grumbled to us about how the Requiem Boxed Set was the craziest thing he’d ever heard. Tiffy and I were fascinated by the concept, however, and I imagined what Requiem Masses written by some of my least favorite composers would be like, such as the bombastic yet foofy Wagner Requiem, the meandering and nonsensical Debussy Requiem, and of course the initially exciting but ultimately repetitive Ravel Requiem.

So if anyone knows anything about this Requiem Boxed Set, let Tiffy and me know. In all these years we have never seen it.

Famous Hat