Singer-songwriter and composer Rufus Wainwright scored his epic Dream Requiem for orchestra, chorus, soprano and narrator. In June 2024, it received its world premiere in Paris with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and the chorus and children’s choir of Radio France conducted by Mikko Franck with Meryl Streep as the narrator and soprano Anna Prohaska. Dream Requiem combines words from the Latin Mass for the with Lord Byron’s apocalyptic poem “Darkness.”

Composed during the pandemic, Wainwright says he wrote it “for the people we have lost in this crisis, for the past from which we are cut off and for the future to which we do not yet know how to connect, a Requiem for human contact, solidarity and the human voice that have all become dangerous and contagious.”