This was scheduled for last year. But because the season of the dead and remembrance is upon us ones more with “Dia de los Muertos” starting in two days, All Saints in three and German national day of mourning (Volkstrauertag) later this month, today we’ll be having requiems, threnodies, laments and monodies.
As it turns out, it was a good move to postpone the mix for a year, for I feel the refinement of the original idea has quite improved the result, the main change being to limit the mix to music written in the 20th century, so don’t be expecting Mozart, Fauré or Verdi.
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NEXT: the already mentioned blunt hour of Hansa Tonstudio 2
1. Morton Feldman – Rothko Chapel 1 (1971)
2. Rudolf Mauersberger – Wie liegt die Stadt so wüst (1945)
3. Alban Berg – Violinkonzert “Dem Andenken eines Engels” (1935)
4. Paul Hindemith – Trauermusik (1936)
5. Krzysztof Penderecki – Lacrimosa (1980)
6. Mikis Theodorakis – Emnisthin Tou Profitou (1985)
7. Tōru Takemitsu – Requiem for strings (1957)
8. Arvo Pärt – Cantus In Memory Of Benjamin Britten (1977)
We start with a Morton Feldman piece written to be performed in the Rothko Chapel, a non-denominational chapel located in Houston with an octagonal array of site-specific Mark Rothko paintings. Rothko had committed suicide year before and while Feldman of course strongly denied this being a memorial to Rothko, it has to be said that in the final movement (not part of this mix) a melody emerges, this must be the sole Feldman composition where that happens.
Next we have Rudolf Mauersberger’s motet “Wie liegt die Stadt so wüst (How deserted sits the city)”, Mauersberger was the director of Dresden’s Kreuzchor and this motet deals with the utter destruction of Dresden in the second world war, first performed in the burnt-out shell of the Kreuzkirche in August 1945. Later he would write the “Dresdner Requiem” dedicated to eleven young choristers who died in the collapsing church.
Alban Berg wrote his Violin Concerto “Dem Andenken eines Engels (To the memory of an angel)” in response to the death of 18-year-old Manon Gropius from polio. He worked so eagerly on it that it’s believed this concerto is the reason that Berg did not manage to complete his opera Lulu before his own death three month after the completion of this work.
“Trauermusik (Funereal Music)” was written in a couple of hours by Paul Hindemith, while visiting London he was asked to write a Requiem for King George V who had died the previous day. Mostly it is a reworking of his “Matthias the Painter symphony”, it was premièred the following day at King George V funeral with Hindemith himself playing a solo part.
In 1980, Krzysztof Penderecki was commissioned by the Solidarność to compose a piece to accompany the unveiling of a statue at the Gdańsk shipyards to commemorate those killed at anti-government riots there in 1970. For the unveiling he wrote this Lacrimosa, which he later expanded into his complete Polish Requiem.
Mikis Theodorakis’ Requiem is dedicated to those killed in the Massacre of Kalavryta, during the second world war German troops gathered all male residents of the town and subsequently machine-gunned them down, killing about 696 people. After that they burned down the birthplace of the Greek War of Independence, the monastery of Agia Lavra. The text of the requiem is taken from Saint John of Damascus, which according to Theodorakis is one of the most beautiful poems in the Greek language.
Tōru Takemitsu is mainly none as a film score composer (Harakiri, Kaidan, Ran and many others) and so it seems fitting that his requiem is dedicated to another film composer Fumio Hayasaka, main composer to the films of Akira Kurosawa but also for example for Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu monogatari. This requiem gained Takemitsu international attention when it was heard and praised by Igor Stravinsky during his visit to Japan.
And lastly we have this short elegy written by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt to, as quite obvious from the title, mourn death of the English composer Benjamin Britten. Britten himself has written at least two requiems: the famous “War Requiem” and the “Sinfonia da Requiem” which caused quite a diplomatic stir being composed to mark the 2600th anniversary of the founding of the Japanese Empire.
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