Commissioned by his publisher, Puccini set the Latin antiphon of the Requiem mass on the occasion of the fourth anniversary of the death of Giuseppe Verdi.
Puccini composed the work on a commission of his publisher Giulio Ricordi on the occasion of the forth anniversary of the death of Giuseppe Verdi.
[2] The work was first performed on 27 January 1905 by the choir of La Scala in Milan, conducted by Aristide Venturi, at the chapel of the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti that Verdi had founded.
In the middle section, the solo viola enters, and the divided voices respond to it; this feature reappears in a short coda.
The musicologist Michele Girardi regarded this theme as an homage at the Enigmatic scale that Verdi had set in the Ave Maria from his Quattro pezzi sacri.