The Messa per Rossini was Verdi’s idea. Days after Rossini’s death in November 1868, he proposed to the publisher Ricordi that a Requiem Mass be assembled. It would be written by 13 leading Italian composers, each of whom would be allocated a single movement, with instructions on timing, key and musical forces. Such was Verdi’s influence, the project was completed within the year. Alas, no one wanted to perform it, least of all the denizens of Bologna, Verdi’s chosen venue. Perhaps they had not forgiven Rossini for describing the city where he had once studied as a “sewer”. A more probable explanation is that the world had moved on. A Requiem for a composer whose Italian career had ended decades earlier by a group of composers writing in largely defunct styles was not what was wanted at the very moment when Italy was stepping out into the world as a forward-looking modern state.

Verdi’s “Libera me” was used, suitably modified, in his own Requiem. It was while researching this in the Ricordi archive that the American scholar David Rosen unearthed a number of the autograph manuscripts of the Messa per Rossini. How the discovery translated into the editing, publishing and, in September 1988, the first performance of the work, is the subject of an interesting short documentary which is included on this DVD.

The performance was filmed in 1988 in the early-19th-century rococo Evangelische Stadtkirche in Ellwangen. The performers are the same as on the CD recording which was made at the time (Hänssler Classic, 2/90 – nla). The choral singing under Helmut Rilling, the prime mover behind the project, is predictably fine. Certainly, it is better to see the Mass, effectively filmed in the German manner, than merely to hear it. For the Bolognese were right. Its appeal is principally to musicologists and those who make it their business to cherish works which the world has chosen to forget.