Thank Goodness Verdi Stuck to Requiems

The Month of the Holy Souls is once again at our doorstep, and how kind of so many merchants and shopkeepers to decorate their stores with purgatorial skulls and black crepe--though I'm a bit confused about the spiderwebs, mummies and werewolves. But all this talk of black vestments and Dies Irae got one of our alert readers, Nathaniel P., thinking:Thinking about the Verdi Requiem got me