Rufus Wainwright mourns the death of the American Dream with his first requiem

CBC

06-02-2025

Rufus Wainwright is a difficult artist to categorize at the best of times. The Canadian-American musician has recorded pop songs, folk music, operas and stage musicals, but his latest album, Dream Requiem, is something entirely different, even for him.
A requiem is a religious work: a mass for the dead. While Wainwright isn't necessarily a religious person (he describes himself as being spiritual or agnostic), he says he approached the project with complete sincerity.
"You have to become a believer when you compose a requiem," Wainwright tells Q 's Tom Power in a Zoom interview. "I think for me, the main thing is that there's such a kind of religious thrust in America now, especially with the right wing and so forth. And I very much, in composing the piece, started to really think about Jesus and what he means and what I think the message is. And I had to say, you know, 'Yes, I think it's about love, it's about redemption, it's about resurrection, it's about peace.'"
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Dream Requiem was born from several sources of inspiration, including Lord Byron's apocalyptic poem Darkness, the music of Italian opera composer Giuseppe Verdi, and Puccini — not the composer, but rather Wainwright's beloved dog who died in 2020 after a tragic accident involving another dog.
Wainwright also managed to recruit Meryl Streep to narrate the project. "It's a role," he says. "It's not an easy thing to do."
You have to become a believer when you compose a requiem. - Rufus Wainwright
But recently, on a flight to Barcelona for the Spanish premiere of Dream Requiem, Wainwright says he realized what the piece is really about: the death of the American Dream.
"It suddenly dawned on me like a ton of bricks," he says. "I was like, 'Oh, Dream Requiem. It's also kind of the death of the American Dream.' What we're experiencing right now politically in the U.S., and subsequently then in the world … it's just this collapse of what America was. And look, I'm not even sure if it will be horrific or amazing. I mean, at this point, it's just so crazy, the whole thing. But it is, nonetheless, the death of the world that we lived in previously."
Wainwright's new album, Dream Requiem, is out now. He'll be touring the requiem later this year, performing it in Los Angeles in May and Amsterdam in June.