The booklet notes for this German release state that, although Carl Maria von Weber pronounced the work "divine," Georg Joseph Abbé Vogler's Requiem was "soon forgotten." This may be so, but Vogler's music was well enough known that Robert Browning could include a poem about him in the collection Dramatis Personae in 1864 and have confidence that readers would know what he was talking about. Browning's poem describes Vogler's ability to improvise spectacular programmatic pieces on the organ (an interesting thing in itself), ...
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The booklet notes for this German release state that, although Carl Maria von Weber pronounced the work "divine," Georg Joseph Abbé Vogler's Requiem was "soon forgotten." This may be so, but Vogler's music was well enough known that Robert Browning could include a poem about him in the collection Dramatis Personae in 1864 and have confidence that readers would know what he was talking about. Browning's poem describes Vogler's ability to improvise spectacular programmatic pieces on the organ (an interesting thing in itself), and one can hear the same kind of vivid representational thinking in this Requiem mass. It's quite an exciting work, clearly the product of a composer acquainted with Mozart's Requiem in D minor, K. 626, but in many ways oriented more toward the nineteenth century, in whose first decade it was composed, than toward the eighteenth. The mass is uneven, but there are some spectacular moments: the unusual harmonic construction of the entire Kyrie section; the scope of the sequence, with...
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