PROGRAM NOTES
Tōru Takemitsu (1930-1996) :: Requiem
Success may come slowly, but recognition can happen overnight. That was the case for Tōru Takemitsu. He was nearly thirty years old when Igor Stravinsky happened to hear the Requiem. Afterward Stravinsky publicly praised the work, effectively launching the international phase of Takemitsu’s career.
Takemitsu heard Western music for the first time as a teenager in the aftermath of World War II. A military officer played a recording for him of a French chanson. What he heard captivated his imagination, driving him to pen and paper. He began to teach himself how to compose, receiving only occasional lessons. Debussy was very influential on the young Takemitsu, as was another French composer, Olivier Messiaen. As a result of these inspirations, Takemitsu’s early music expresses a unique blend of chromatics, tonalities, and space. Later he would return to exploring the traditional music of his homeland, revealing music of brilliantly interwoven textures featuring Japanese instruments alongside Western.
Requiem is Latin for “rest,” and opens the chant Requiem aeternam dona eis (give them eternal rest) intoned at a Catholic mass for the dead. Takemitsu intended it as a more universal plea, perhaps emphasized by the fact that he utilizes no verbal text. In a 1965 letter to the program annotator for the New York Philharmonic, Takemitsu expresses, “I titled [it] ‘requiem’...we are bereaved of our people in the war—not only Japanese, our world. I think, music must be a form of prayer.” More specifically, the work also nods at a specific loss, that of composer Fumio Hayasaka. One of the undisputed masters of Japanese cinematic music, Hayasaka provided the soundtracks to many of Akira Kurosawa’s films. He also served as a mentor for the young Takemitsu.
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) :: “Adagietto” from Symphony No. 5
Mahler lived a relatively short life, something that isn’t typically discussed. Within the limit of his fifty-one years he penned dozens of works and nine (or ten, depending on categorization technicalities) symphonies, each one massive in scope (as he said himself, containing an entire world). Perhaps even more astonishing is that he also spent his entire professional career as a composer working on his music almost only in the summers, since he was otherwise occupied with his obligations as director of the Vienna Court Opera. Mahler was in his early twenties when Richard Wagner, and then Franz Liszt, died. Therefore the musical world he inherited was one of grand scale story—both explicitly through the art of opera, and implicitly through the romantic era’s obsession with program music, or music that conveyed a narrative using instruments only (no lyrics, no singers). Symphonic form, proper, had been largely avoided in the later half of the19th century, and replaced with tone poems or other large impressionistic instrumental works. Though Mahler chose to return to the symphony, proper, as his preferred structure for musical expression, he often infused narrative, and Mahler’s symphonies can be grouped, in part, by whether or not they included programmatic elements.
The Symphony No. 5 is an example of one of the non-programmatic symphonies, and yet it is brimming with deeply felt emotions that were reactions to facing death and love in succession. Having survived a hemorrhage that almost claimed his life, Mahler would have certainly had a profound feeling of gratefulness to meet and marry Alma Schindler one year later. Reflecting this astounding reversal of fortune, the Symphony No. 5 opens with the punctuating brass announcement of a funeral march, and releases into a luxurious declaration of passion in its slow movement, which has become famous on its own as the Adagietto.
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) :: Symphony No. 14, Op. 135
Every work of art emerges from its context. In some cases, it’s a reaction against its context. In others, it’s an affirmation. Either way, the product is an extension of the creator’s experience.
Dmitri Shostakovich’s context was Soviet Russia. In his experience, the government was always watching and listening. At any moment, you could anger the authorities and be punished in a variety of ways: public ridicule in a government sanctioned newspaper, the banning of your music, or in extreme cases simply be taken away in the night, never to return to your life as you knew it. In that environment, secrecy was key. This shroud of mystery provokes Shostakovich’s biographers to argue about his motivations. Did he really believe Soviet policy? Did he just pretend to comply with whatever the government said so that he could live as undisturbed as possible? It’s impossible to know. Shostakovich kept no diary, other than what he revealed emotionally in his music. Even then, the truth of his music lies far beyond our reach, because as Michael Mishra has wisely cautioned, “any answers, as obvious as some of them may appear to be, remain speculative.”
As the 1960s began, Shostakovich faced an increase of alarming health crises including diphtheria, a bout with polio, bone fractures, and heart problems. He also faced an emotional crisis when he succumbed to building pressure to join the Communist Party in 1960. Those wrought feelings emerge in what is arguably his most famous, and personal, string quartet: No. 8. Shostakovich wrote to Isaak Glickman:
I started thinking that if some day I die, nobody is likely to write a work in memory of me, so I had better write one myself. The title page could carry the dedication: “To the memory of the composer of this quartet.”
Shostakovich’s compositions from that point onward were preoccupied with death (physical, and likely emotional/spiritual as well), including his Symphony No. 14, written in 1969 and inspired by Modest Mussorgsky’s The Songs and Dances of Death. Though he deliberately labeled it as a symphony, it’s really more of a large-scale song cycle. A master of orchestration, Shostakovich made the very specific choice to write for extremes, scoring the work for soprano, bass, strings and percussion. The pairings, compliments, and contrasts he found within that ensemble are sharp and arresting to the ear. At just under an hour, the length invites the listener into total absorption. The selection of the poets appears to have layered meaning, reflecting the composer’s own state of being. Federico García Lorca, Guillaume Apollinaire, Wilhelm Küchelbecker, and Rainer Maria Rilke all died young—the oldest was barely 51—from extreme health failures and/or under political duress.
Shostakovich observed, “Fear of death may be the most intense emotion of all. I sometimes think that there is no deeper feeling. The irony lies in the fact that under the influence of that fear, people create poetry, prose and music; that is, they try to strengthen their ties with the living and increase their influence on them. How can you not fear death? I wrote a number of works reflecting my understanding of the question. The most important of them is the Fourteenth Symphony.”
Given the subject matter, the Symphony No. 14 can feel daunting, or overwhelmingly morbid. However, it is vital to remember Shostakovich’s intent: “I want listeners to this symphony to realize that life is truly beautiful. My symphony is an impassioned protest against death, a reminder to the living that they should live honestly, conscientiously, nobly, never committing a base act.”
-Kathryn J Allwine Bacasmot
Kathryn J Allwine Bacasmot is a pianist/harpsichordist, musicologist, music and cultural critic, and freelance writer. A graduate of New England Conservatory, she writes program annotations for ensembles nationwide.
