Lacrimosa (CV-19 Quilt Patch)

(By Pauline Ridley for the CV-19 Quilt)

My patch shows the opening notes of the Lacrimosa movement of Mozart’s Requiem. Why has that become my symbol of lockdown?

A couple of years ago, after a lifetime of moaning about being unable to sing, I decided to take some lessons. I had no plans to sing in front of anyone else but just wanted to be able to sing in the privacy of my home without wincing at the duff notes. After searching online I found an excellent teacher and gradually started to build up my confidence. I couldn’t afford to keep having private lessons but wanted to carry on singing so I joined the Laughton Village Choir run by my teacher after having been blown away by their performance of Brahms Requiem last summer.  The weekly practice meetings have introduced me to a new community, helped me rediscover the joy of choral music, and to  my own surprise I was able to join in with a couple of concerts in the autumn. After Christmas we started learning the Mozart Requiem, to be performed at Balcombe church in the finale of the Villages Festival in June.

Then came Covid. We cancelled rehearsals about a week before lockdown and have since learned that choirs are considered a particularly risky kind of gathering for spreading the virus. So we still don’t know when we will be allowed to meet again for full choir rehearsals. Meanwhile the performance has been postponed to next June*, and choir members committed to trying to learn our parts in isolation in advance of our eventual reunion. Fortunately the leader of my section offered to run virtual practice sessions each week on WhatsApp or Zoom. We can’t sing simultaneously due to the time lag but instead sing along with microphones muted and then take it in turns to unmute to sing to the others and get feedback. Recently we’ve also begun to meet physically in small widely distanced open air groups.

So for me, the Mozart requiem has become both the soundtrack and the salvation of this very weird period. I chose the Lacrimosa movement to portray, because it’s beautiful (you can hear it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLvFgd_glxo ) and because the words “This tearful day….Grant [the dead] eternal rest” seemed  appropriate for the last few months.

I had planned a more elaborate patch but time was short so the embroidered music is done rather crudely with thicker thread than I’d have liked. This was sewn on a piece of semitransparent voile overlaid on to a cotton square with a pattern based on the many images of the Covid-19 virus itself. Again due to lack of time I gave up on the idea of printing the Covid pattern and drew it with felt tip pens instead; in any case it is largely muffled by the musical veil. I’m still pondering whether to add elastic loops to the latter, to make it more like a face mask so I’ll probably wait until we start to put the quilt together later in the year. Either way, I like the idea that the music is drowning out the virus.

* Details at https://www.villagesmusicfestival.org/