Requiem

I look at all the bits of my life as how time ravages what we care.

I now hear Mozart's Requiem in my head as I step into the world, a chance to be tender about this solemnity called life, this acrid, broken, beautiful life.

The other day I was reading a poem called At Night I Let All the Women Inside Me Roam Around the House by the marvelous poet Kelly Grace Thomas.

And it made me realize how interweaved our lives are into a hundred other iterations of our own lives and how so many unconnected things and occurrences in our world instantly become ours how the tiniest things which might be happening because it is in the nature to do so still find incredible resonance in our lives reaffirming something inside us making our lives better just by being Thus a ray lightens us up.

Giuseppe Verdi was a great opera composer and didn't believe in writing useless things like requiems, but then on the death of the famous Italian poet Alexander Manzoni, was so moved that he wrote one of his greatest musical works.

Grief does wonders, doesn't it? One of my earliest memories from my childhood was listening to Verdi's Requiem, holding my hands up in the sky, and then pounding my fist in time to the big drum of the Dies Irae prayer.

Dies Irae literally means day of wrath.

What does wrath mean? Extreme anger.

Listen to this.

Dies Irae from Giuseppe Verdi's Requiem.

[Requiem music]

[Requiem music][singing]

And so I had this kind of rich cultural education that I think really helped me throughout all my life, but especially as I've been healing, to tap into the music.

There are certain classical works, um, Mozart's Requiem and Handel's Messiah and Brahms' Requiem, which are powerful healing music, and when you sing along to it, you do feel this healing kind of energy move throughout your body and, and it's, uh, satisfying and it makes you feel whole.

And so I've been deeply blessed that the music was also-- has also been the key to my healing.

And so how ironic for my handlers to have me wander off the reservation and say, "Yeah, I'm not gonna be working for you.

A piece of music that's been, uh, something of a soundtrack or, uh, something in your ear.

Mozart's Requiem is one of my favorites.

So eating a burrito and listening to Mozart's Requiem, that-

What could be better? [laughs]

Very inspiring.

So honestly, it was Lana Del Rey and Phoebe Bridgers, who are two of my favorite California girls, who are amazing lyricists and incredible vocalists.

But if I can continue, I will note that previously with that son, the other music video I watched was a YouTube video, the Queen of the Night's incredible aria, Hell's Revenge, because I saw The Magic Flute at the end of your last season.

So that's something like a burrito and Mozart's Requiem.

On the New York Philharmonic Symphony broadcast, presented by most of these same stations this Sunday, you'll hear the second of two all-Mozart programs.

Bruno Walter will conduct the Mozart Symphony No. 25 in G Major, and then we'll present the rarely performed Mozart Requiem.

That's this Sunday on CBS Radio.

Star.

The tremendous words of the Dies Irae were visible and almost audible in the vocal score, and the melancholy of Mozart's countenance was enhanced by his belief that he was in the act of composing his own dirge.

For he had headed it, Requiem di me, W.A. Mozart, and he was inspired by a settled conviction, intuition, call it what you will, that he would die at the conclusion of this task.

All its circumstances were ominous and mysteriously foreboding.

The composer had been working two or three months before upon his magnificent opera Die Zauberflöte, The Magic Flute.

You should be more businesslike with him, Wolfgang.

Dear heaven, was not a man without a kreutzer of income enough to do and to think of in a place like this, groaned the master, turning his eyes around the depressing and ill-conditioned room.

I tell you, Stanzero, I shall receive another fifty ducats when this Requiem score is finished.

Or rather, you will, for I shall not be alive to enjoy it.

The Robert Shaw Chorale there with "La Voici." You're with Radio Southland on 96.4 FM, and it's light, bright, and classical.

And from Mozart's Requiem comes "Lacrimosa," and that is performed for us by the Vienna Sinfonia and Opera Chorus.

[classical music]

[classical music]The Vienna Sinfonia and Opera Chorus there with the Lacrimosa from Mozart's Requiem.

James Last's Orchestra have for us Tchaikovsky's Romance.

[instrumental music] We're up to our last item.