Canada’s Rufus Wainwright, best known for blending folk and pop music, has worked with stars like Elton John, Brandi Carlile, and Miley Cyrus. He comes from a famous folk family – his father is Loudon Wainwright III, his mother is Kate McGarrigle, and his sister is Martha Wainwright. He has loved classical music since childhood, when his mom introduced him to the works of Giuseppe Verdi.
Wainwright’s new album, Dream Requiem, was partly inspired by Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi. It’s interwoven with Lord Byron’s poem Darkness, written in 1816 after a massive volcano erupted in Indonesia and affected the climate worldwide.
The LA Master Chorale and the LA Children’s Chorus will perform Dream Requiem, narrated by actress Jane Fonda, on May 4 at Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Wainwright tells KCRW that at age 13, he liked pop artists such as Cyndi Lauper, Eurythmics, and Tina Turner, but was seeking a “darker shade or tone.” Then his mom brought home Verdi’s Requiem, which premiered in 1874, and after two hours of listening, he was “converted into an opera fanatic.”
“It was like the death of my childhood in a lot of ways, and the beginning of my romantic adolescence,” he recalls. “And I immediately went out and started seeking operas in record store bins, and so forth, and it hasn't abated.”
He points out that Verdi’s Requiem was the first secular mass that could be performed in a concert hall and not just a church. Still, it’s inherently a religious piece and must be treated as such, he says.
“I went to Catholic school, and my family was Catholic for a long time. … All of that stuff boiled up when I started composing and especially working with the Latin text, because it is so ingrained in our psyche. So yeah, I did become somewhat religious, actually, while writing it, or spiritual, shall we say?”
Dream Requiem is also dedicated to Wainwright’s dog, named after Italian composer Giacomo Puccini. He explains that during the COVID pandemic, he and his husband Jörn Weisbrodt got a mini Australian shepherd for their daughter Viva, and the couple fell in love with Puccini too. However, a few months after getting him, a larger dog killed him right in front of Weisbrodt’s eyes.
“So I dedicated the piece partially … to Puccini. It's also a little joke because, of course, people think it's the composer, but it's actually not. But the other thing is that in the poem Darkness … there is a beautiful section about a dog and the death of a little dog who's trying to protect its master from cannibals.”
How is Lord Byron’s Darkness relevant today? “It's an apocalyptic vision that he had. … Unfortunately, at our time now, I think we're faced with a more realistic darkness situation. I think a lot of the things that Byron is referencing are things that we're actually going to have to face,” Wainwright says, referring to climate change.
Plus, with the April 21 death of Pope Francis, how is Wainwright processing all this? He says he’s always believed in music’s prescient power.
“Oftentimes it's the case that you will hear the spirit of something that hasn't occurred yet in a song … or a symphony. … And then reality hits. I think this piece has landed, and that what's going on now is very embedded, and what I was foreseeing when I composed. … A lot of people do this in music. And that being said, yes, I think the fact that the pope has just passed is meaningful in the sense that we need all the goodness we can get in this world. … Certainly his whole ethos of helping the poor and helping migrants and so forth was something that we have to really focus on again.”
At the end of Dream Requiem, Wainwright offers a glimmer of hope. The LA Children’s Chorus will perform this section on May 4.
“I am giving a kernel of something. And what I found is that … underneath the children's choir, there's actually … a small quartet of solo strings, and they sound like fiddlers. And that goes back to my folk upbringing, where folk music does have that just eternal reel that humanity revolves around, and just keeps going no matter what.”
