Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem is a religious work, but he did not write it for the church. It is typical concert hall music in which orchestra and choir perfectly complement each other. Even though it is a mass for the dead, you can hear in everything that Verdi was above all a composer for the theatre. The music is full of dramatic effects and some vocal solos sound like arias from an opera. The choral parts have an expressiveness not found in traditional church music. They are full of contrasts, the melodic lines are capricious and wide-ranging. And the orchestra presents itself throughout as a partner in dialogue. Time and again, individual instruments come to the fore with solos. This creates a remarkable “depth effect”: through the contrasts between whisper-soft and overwhelmingly loud, the concert hall seems much larger than it is. It is not surprising that the piece sounds so deeply felt. Verdi is mourning the death of the writer Alessandro Manzoni, one of his heroes. Indirectly, it is also a homage to his great predecessor Rossini, who had died a few years earlier.