The Dazzling Precision of Robert Shaw

When you listen to a really fine chorus in America today — the kind that pops out pearl-like syllables and places a judicious halo around each phrase — you are hearing the legacy of Robert Shaw. He was routinely referred to as "the country's greatest choral conductor," which actually sounds like faint praise for such a hugely influential musician. When he died in 1999, at 82, he left a nation studded with singers and choir directors whom he had trained, bullied, hired or inspired. He had also created an American choral style as distinctive, in its way, as the limpid cathedral singing of England or the chesty baritones of Russia. Listen to his precision and sweep of his Messiah, the mystic depths of Rachmaninoff's Vespers or the buoyant majesty of his Brahms German Requiem.

But listen, above all, to Shaw's version of the Verdi Requiem, which is as thrilling as any in the catalogue. This monument of spiritual music is regularly regarded as if it were an opera that happened to be in Latin, instead of as a liturgical work by a composer who happened to write operas. There's some justification for an approach that privileges the score's violent drama and the vivid hues. By the time Verdi turned to a sacred text, the sexagenarian composer had had plenty of practice penning group lamentations, angelic hymns, outbursts of gnashing and malediction and tender implorations. He did not retire his show business manner for a work that had less to do with the Church than with his feelings of loss over the novelist and fellow patriot Alessandro Manzoni. A whiff of gunpowder and greasepaint clings to the score.

In his landmark recording for Telarc, made with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Shaw discovers broader vistas of spiritual rapture than many of his swashbuckling colleagues who had been reared in the opera house. The mass for the dead begins with a choral murmur: "requiem aeternam" (eternal rest). Shaw captures the beauty of desolation, of grief suppressed. Choruses tend to get murky when they get soft, but Shaw doesn't allow that to happen. Instead, he gets a crystalline sound, one that hovers on the threshold of audibility. Shaw was famous for drilling singers until they yielded dazzling precision. In the high-speed opening of the "Sanctus," 100 people's separate "s's" come together in a short, sharp shock, and each fugal entrance has a diamond-honed edge. Shaw believed in the cumulative effect of detail. He felt that muddiness was never mysterious, and that every semiquaver, no matter how seemingly insignificant, deserved to be heard. Rehearsing, he once said, means being able to sustain "the belief that each detail has spiritual energy."

He could be biting in pursuit of that precision. "I get a horrible picture from the way you sing, of little bitty eighth notes running like hell all over the place to keep from being stepped on," he once wrote to members of the Collegiate Chorale, which he founded in 1941. "Millions of 'em! Meek, squeaky little things. No self-respect. Standing in corners, hiding behind doors, ducking into subway stations, peering out from under rugs. Refugees. Dammit, you're all a bunch of Whole-Note Nazis." His rehearsals could be as grueling as they were exhilarating, and he was acutely aware that obsessing over minutiae could bleed the exaltation out of a score. Some of his performances did come off as fussy and bloodless; they could, on occasion become a little spinsterish. But certainly not the "Dies Irae" of the Requiem, with its fearsome, temple-shivering rage. This is fury born of meticulousness and stoked by awe.

I met Shaw only once, two years before he died, and the odd thing was that after a lifetime devoted to turning choral singing from a largely social activity into a high-level, often professional pursuit, what he really wanted to talk about were the secretaries, teachers, lawyers, and bus drivers who sang in choruses in the evenings and on weekends. "The arts are like sex — too important to leave to the professionals," he told me. "One of the reasons I enjoy choral music is that it is rather significantly the amateur's art." That meant of course, that he was free to browbeat and drill his singers to exhaustion, because they could leave if they chose — a luxury that many orchestra conductors, hogtied by union rules, must have envied. But more crucially, Shaw felt, high-level amateurs retained a moral urgency and physical delight in making music. Singing, if you weren't being paid for it, could never just be a job.