Those who love to indulge in the luxury of woe, and who fancy that plentiful tears and a thoroughly broken-hearted manner are the proper accompaniments to a mourning dress, highly approve of the anti-rubrical exhibition of painted or embroidered skulls and cross-bones, heightened in effect by a diapering of gigantic tears, which the artist in funereal trappings has intruded upon the altar or about the catafalque. The Requiem Masses of Mozart and Cherubini would certainly admit of these imitative skeletons and mechanical grief; but not so the Gregorian Requiem.
Hark! what are those strange words which break the silence as [pg 327] the coffin is borne into the church? “Subvenite sancti Dei, occurrite Angeli Domini, suscipientes animam ejus, offerentes eam in conspectu Altissimi. Suscipiat te Christus qui vocavit te, et in sinu Abrahæ angeli deducant te.”[91]
And now the Introit begins, which gives the keynote, so to speak, to the whole Mass:
“Requiem æternam dona eis Domine; et lux perpetua luceat eis.”[92]
What a world of comfort in those words! How soothing and hopeful; and chanted to such a smooth, sweet melody, like oil poured out upon the troubled waters, calming the agitated and fretted spirits of the mourners, and gently turning all hearts away from the thoughts of the irreparable loss they have sustained, and shutting out the memory of the scenes of anguish and horror that marked the hours of the agony and death, solicits them to pray for the soul of the beloved departed, and to cast all their sorrow at the feet of God.
Doubtless you presume the chant is very sorrowful; and, like all Gregorian chant, this is, of course, “in the minor key.” Not at all, however inexplicable it may appear to you. Read over again what we have just written above, and now learn one more astonishing fact. The chant for this Introit is written in the sixth mode, the only one of all the Gregorian modes whose scale is identical with the scale of the modern major key!
There is not an invitation to weep in the whole Requiem, neither in the words nor in the melody. It is true the church takes care to improve the occasion by preaching her sermon on the Judgment in the chant of the Dies Iræ; but she soon returns to her keynote of comforting prayer, and at the Communio (which, of course, is not sung at all at our concert requiems) she essays even a bright and cheerful melody in the triumphant eighth mode, to the old refrain,
“Lux æterna luceat eis,”
and, addressing the sweet mercy of God, inspires hope and submission to the divine will by the reminder that he is ever kind and good—“quia pius es.”
Oh! what is this? It is the sympathizing pressure of the hand of the old, old friend who has always been true in sunshine and storm, in our sins and our miseries; it is her sheltering arm that folds our drooping head upon her gentle breast, and her cheery voice that has so often gladdened us in days gone by, soothing our broken heart with the only words that have power with us now—“God is good,” “It is his holy will.”