The words of the Requiem—the Latin Mass of the Dead—date from the earliest days of Christianity. As great composers across the centuries set the Catholic liturgy to music, they invariably expressed their own feelings about death and grieving. But even as the length of the pieces and the size of the performing forces exploded the framework of a regular church service, the classical Requiems, from Mozart to Fauré, were still approaching the same age-old liturgical text, even if they did so by working in their own individual styles. Benjamin Britten changed that in his War Requiem (1962), addressing not just death and grieving in a religious context, but the destruction wrought by war in particular. He went beyond the words of the Roman liturgy and included a set of war poems by Wilfred Owen. In doing so, he “personalized” the Requiem and stressed that, it is not only timeless but also about the here and now.
Gabriela Lena Frank—one of the most prominent American composers of her generation—has cited Britten’s work as a decisive influence on her own composition, which likewise juxtaposes the liturgical words with other texts. Conquest Requiem was written for the Houston Symphony and its then music director, the Colombian Andrés Orozco-Estrada, at the end of a three-year stint as Composer-in-Residence. Of partly Peruvian ancestry, Frank is deeply immersed in Latin American culture and history. If for Britten sixty years ago, World War II was the event that could place the Requiem in a new light, for Frank, it is La Conquista, the violent colonization of the Americas by Spain, which likewise claimed untold numbers of victims. But that was not enough for Frank and her librettist Nilo Cruz, Pulitzer Prize-winning Cuban-American playwright. They decided to take one more step, and put a pair of real-life people in the center of the conquest narrative. Those individuals are La Malinche, a crucial figure in the early history of what eventually became Mexico, and her son Martín. A Nahua woman enslaved at a young age and endowed with exceptional linguistic and diplomatic skills, La Malinche served as interpreter between the Spaniards. She became the lover of conquistador Hernán Cortés, and the son she had with him, Martín, was said to be the “first Mestizo.” To this day, La Malinche is a controversial character; some consider her a traitor for consorting with the enemy and facilitating the Spanish victory over the natives, while others claim that her actions avoided even more bloodshed and celebrate her as the mother of the Mexican nation.
The soprano and baritone soloists in the work represent La Malinche and Martín, respectively. Her feelings of guilt and his search for his true identity are expressed by Spanish poetry written by Cruz, and Nahuatl poetry as preserved in old manuscripts. These poems complement the words of the Requiem, of which Frank used only a few selected portions in her work. A fourth poetic source is a Latin poem from the 10th century by Eugenius Vulgarius—a passionate plea against war that brings yet another perspective into the mix.
Mix is in fact the key word here, as it shares its Latin origin with the Spanish word mestizo. For all the pain that accompanied the Conquest, it resulted in the creation of a new culture, the culture of mestizaje upon which the modern Latin American societies were built. A mestiza herself, Frank values and cherishes this culture and considers the Requiem as a whole to be a mestizo work, uniting the world of Roman Catholicism with Native American traditions, and combining a symphony orchestra, whose origins are European, with Nahuatl culture. The Conquest Requiem is a meditation over a tragic history in which sins can be forgiven, wounds can heal, and a new world can be born from the ashes of the old.
Notes by Peter Laki
