Rufus Wainwright's ‘Dream Requiem' turns climate doom into cathartic beauty, with Jane Fonda as voice of reckoning

Malay Mail

05-05-2025

NEW YORK, May 5 — The historic Mount Tambora volcanic eruption spewed so much ash and debris that it triggered a 'year without summer' and the apocalypse seemed nigh — an apt parallel to our own chaotic existence, says the eclectic musician Rufus Wainwright.
The artist's ambitious modern-day requiem, which draws inspiration from the 19th-century catastrophe as well as the Requiem Mass, will premiere stateside on Sunday in Los Angeles, with narration by the actor and activist Jane Fonda.
The Canadian-American Wainwright composed Dream Requiem as the globe was picking up the pieces after the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic, and turned to Lord Byron's poem Darkness which is centred on the fear and disarray that followed the 1815 Mount Tambora eruption.
The artist, best known for his distinct theatrical pop, has focused more on opera in recent years and said the poem is all the more prescient given the looming threat of climate cataclysm, as well as our tumultuous contemporary politics.
'In this day and age, it's a similar kind of intense sense of doom,' Wainwright told AFP in an interview ahead of the Los Angeles show.
'I think we're a little less misguided than they were back then, but who knows what the future holds?'
Wainwright's global premiere of Dream Requiem was at the Auditorium de Radio France in Paris last summer, with Meryl Streep narrating and featuring soprano Anna Prohaska.
A recording of the work is available from Warner Classics.
Wainwright said Fonda's participation in the upcoming performance with the Los Angeles Master Chorale lends additional intensity to the piece, given her long history of activism and her special emphasis in recent years on climate change.
'She's one of the great heroines,' he said of the storied 87-year-old film star. 'Certainly with what America has been through in the last couple of months, I think it'll be very powerful.'
And that the show's US premiere comes mere months after deadly wildfires ravaged parts of Los Angeles adds yet another layer, he said.
'Glimmer of life'
Wainwright has written two classical operas, set Shakespearean sonnets to song and produced a tribute concert to Judy Garland in addition to releasing a string of pop albums.
He has a particular penchant for Giuseppe Verdi: 'When I was 13, I listened to Verdi's Requiem from top to tail, and it was like I'd been infected by a virus,' he said.
Musical settings of the Catholic Requiem Mass are themselves known as requiems; Verdi's tells of the death-fearing living who seek deliverance.
'I've always been more at ease, you know, communicating dread and foreboding,' the 51-year-old Wainwright said.
But it's not all gloom, he added: 'A few weeks after I premiered it, and I had some distance from it, I realised, oh no, there is hope. There is sort of this little glimmer of life.'
'Redemption and forgiveness' go hand in hand with the dread, and 'I like to maintain some modicum of hope,' Wainwright said.
'Hopefully this is sort of like a resurrection, shall we say, of both that feeling of dread — but also that need to face the music and deal with the problem at hand.' — AFP