Prelude to the Puccini Year

Giacomo Puccini, one of the most successful and important opera composers of all time, left very few works for the concert hall. The best-known and most extensive of these is not a symphonic but a liturgical one: the so-called "Messa di Gloria," a setting of the Ordinary of the Mass for tenor, baritone, choir and orchestra lasting about three quarters of an hour, which the then 21-year-old scion of a dynasty of church musicians active for generations at the cathedral church of San Martino in Lucca wrote in 1880 to conclude his training. The unpublished manuscript then lay dormant in a drawer for decades before the work could be presented to an astonished public only in 1952. As a prelude to the coming commemorative year 2024, which marks the 100th anniversary of Puccini's death, the Vienna Philharmonic and the Vienna Singverein conducted by Ádám Fischer are now presenting it at the Wiener Konzerthaus. They precede this early genius rarity, in which the entire melting point of Puccini's unique compositional voice is already laid out, with the early version of Giuseppe Verdi's "Libera me", composed in 1869, which five years later was to form the nucleus and conclusion of Verdi's "Messa da Requiem", thus building a subtle dramaturgical bridge from the current Verdi to the coming Puccini anniversary: In 1904, Puccini composed a small "Requiem" for the fourth anniversary of Verdi's death, actually just a setting of the antiphon to the Introit of the Mass for the Dead, possibly as part of a collaborative work by several composers that was planned but not executed. In a very similar vein, Verdi had written his "Libera me" in 1869 as a contribution to a requiem for Gioachino Rossini, who had died the previous year, which had been written as a collaborative work by thirteen Italian composers but had never been performed.

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