Verdi’s Requiem stands at the summit of nineteenth century liturgical music. First performed in a church in Milan in 1874, it is written in a musical language closer to the dramatic than to the devotional. Verdi’s intention was to express the emotional meaning and implications of the liturgical text, doing so with the musical tools that he mastered as a dramatist.

Free to reveal something of his own attitude to death, he did not indulge in gentle resignation or joyful anticipation of an afterlife; his Requiem is a mass not for the dead but for the living. The intensity and the compassion of his expression of the human condition in his masterpiece are Shakespearean in stature.

This live recording from the year 1970 is truly a legendary recording, featuring outstanding soloists (American mezzo-soprano Carol Smith, by the way, will be remembered by many for her years of collaboration with the Zurich Opera) and Holland’s preeminent Residentie Orkest and the N.O.S. Chorus under the direction of maestro Willem van Otterloo.