Eternal rest, perpetual light and the Last Judgement: Antoine Brumel’s Dies irae in the early Requiem tradition

Antoine Brumel’s Missa pro defunctis is one of the earliest polyphonic Requiem settings, and the first by several decades to include the sequence, Dies irae. Whereas most chants in the Mass for the Dead were set c.1500 to the low-pitched, highly consonant polyphony that denoted mourning and penitence at the time, the Dies irae is a musical portrayal of the Last Judgement that might seem to demand more vivid polyphonic treatment. And yet Brumel’s setting, a grand alternatim movement, responds more to the formal regularity of the chant than to its text, which describes a terrifying scene much like what is seen in contemporaneous visual depictions of the Last Judgement. Indeed, Brumel’s most striking rhetorical moment comes not in the frightening early verses of the sequence but in its concluding plea to Christ that the dead be granted peace. Analysis of Brumel’s Dies irae in the context of his Missa pro defunctis, therefore, shows that early Requiem compositions, even at their most terrifying, serve first and foremost as functional pleas to God that the deceased be granted eternal rest and perpetual light.