Gabriel Fauré wanted at all costs to avoid making his Requiem sound too dramatic, and sought to give the work an optimistic tone. The hopeful tone of the work struck his contemporaries. According to Fauré, someone rightly dubbed his Requiem a ‘lullaby of death’ – death as a transition to the heavenly joys of the afterlife.

In Rédemption, a vocal fresco with Wagnerian élan, the Liège-born César Franck describes the pitiless combat between materialism and spirituality, at the end of which the message of Christ the redeemer triumphs.