Requiem pour L.

At the time of Mozart’s death in 1791, his famous “Requiem” was a fragment, later to be complemented by his pupil. For his new production with Alain Platel, composer Fabrizio Cassol uncovered the original parts and, collaborating with musicians from Africa and Europe, developed a musical ceremony that opens up new avenues for dealing with death. A new kind of requiem mass emerged, moving between different cultures and yet turning the music even more into a personal communication between people, and thus into a kind of spiritual and lively musical accompaniment to the journey at the end of every life.

Because the piece quite specifically and visibly accompanies a woman in the process of dying. The letter L in the title of this world premiere stands for this woman’s name and life. The “Requiem pour L.” is dedicated to this woman from Flanders and her final, quiet journey from this life. Fourteen musicians from various continents interweave Mozart’s compositions with the worlds of opera, of jazz and of popular music from Africa.

“Requiem pour L.” is not a simple piece of theatre and it is certainly not “just” simply theatre. Platel and Cassol have created a contemporary kind of mass for death; not dance theatre, but rather a very lively and physical kind of playing music on the proverbial field of graves. Their requiem is an exercise in ars moriendi, the art of dying, without which there can be no art of living. In their collaborations, Cassol and Platel generally meet in a kind of “métissage”, a blend of cultures, creating new universes. Their previous cooperation projects include adaptations of Monteverdi’s “Vespro della Beata Vergine” (“vsprs”, 2006), Bach’s “St Matthew Passion” (“pitié!”, 2008) and the Western baroque repertoire (“Coup Fatal”, 2014).