Jonas Mekas and Giuseppe Verdi: Requiem

On September 15, Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius, together with the Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre, is screening Requiem, the last film of late Lithuanian-American filmmaker Jonas Mekas. The film is set to a live performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Messa da Requiem, and this will be only a second full performance in the world, after its premiere in 2019 commissioned for the newly opened art space The Shed by Hans Ulrich Obrist and its director Alex Poots, performed under the baton of Teodor Currentzis.

At the same time, this event, curated by Edvardas Šumila, becomes part of the Lithuanian season in France and the main event of the Jonas Mekas Poetry Day initiated by the Pompidou Centre and celebrated in many countries and institutions throughout the world.

It is well known that a Requiem is a funeral mass in the Catholic liturgical rite. In modern history, they often commemorate extraordinary bereavements. Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem was written for Alessandro Manzoni, a figure in Italian unification and a novelist. Manzoni's most famous novel, I promessi sposi (The Betrothed), became the seminal source that Jonas Mekas read in preparing a kind of visual counterpoint to the composition. The mood of the novel, in which the story of two lovers, Lucia and Renzo, is told against the backdrop of 17th-century hardships, intrigues, and historical twists, dissolves the historical distance. The themes that Jonas Mekas conveys in his poetic and experimental cinematic language—the admiration of nature, and the celebration of the beauty of life—are accompanied here by the intervention of tragic and important world events, which are shown in the recognizable Jonas Mekas’ way, using what he had already tried out before—not directly but with mediated footage of television and newspaper clippings, recalling his film Lithuania and the Collapse of the USSR (2008). However, the film has a sense of immediacy, which is paradoxically created by Jonas Mekas’ camera and gaze, familiar to us from his diary films.

Creating a Requiem as one’s last work also marks the end of the master’s life as a work of art, which can only be spoken of without exaggeration in the rare case of particularly deeply self-reflective artists. As a result,  Mekas’ Requiem inevitably becomes the final curtain, the last poem and farewell.

The fact that Jonas Mekas’s final work is paired with a monumental piece of classical music is no coincidence either. Mekas performed everything he undertook with great musicality and a poetic ethos that stemmed  from both his early surroundings in Semeniškės and Biržai, and his later absorption of the most vivid impressions of his arrival in New York in 1949. In one of his recollections, he stressed the importance of opera in his life: he would sneak into the old New York opera house after the first act, and years later when it was demolished, he passed by and picked up a fragment of the ceiling decoration, which, as he said, was “impregnated with some of the greatest voices of the first half of the 20th century.” Verdi is, of course, first and foremost an opera composer, so it is also special that the opportunity to showcase Mekas’ last work in the country of his birth is presented in the most fitting location for the piece—the Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre.

The work will be performed by the Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre Orchestra and Choir, conducted by Principal Conductor Ričardas Šumila. The soloist parts will be sung by the most prominent Lithuanian opera soloists, Viktorija Miškūnaitė, Justina Gringytė, Edgaras Montvidas, and Kostas Smoriginas.

Acknowledgements: Sebastian Mekas, Elle Burchill, Inès Henzler, Jean-Max Colard, Gražina Michnevičiūtė.

Edvardas Šumila is a scholar, writer, and curator who works at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius and is a doctoral candidate at the New School for Social Research. He started out as a pianist and entered the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, subsequently turning his activities towards musicology. Gradually, he established his interests mainly in critical theory, aesthetics, and political engagement, with a particular focus on the thought of Theodor W. Adorno. Recently, he has been working on the theories of Second Nature in relation to environmental theories and art under neoliberal conditions. He is one of the founders and curators of AHEAD, a festival for electronic sound practices, and has curated and directed a number of other festivals, events, and exhibitions.