David Robertson is the Beofor Music Director and Conductor.
Christine Brewer is the Stanley J. Goodman Guest Artist.
Marietta Simpson is the Monsanto Guest Artist.
Amy Kaiser is the AT&T Foundation Chorus Director.
The concert of Friday, February 3, is underwritten in part by a generous gift from Dr. and Mrs. Timothy J. Eberlein.
The concert of Sunday, February 5, is underwritten in part by a generous gift from Mr. and Mrs. B.W. Durham, Jr.
The concert of Friday, February 3, is sponsored by American Airlines.
The concert of Saturday, February 4, is sponsored by Thompson Coburn.
 

Sorrow and Solace
BY PAUL SCHIAVO 

More are men’s ends marked than their lives before.
The setting sun, and music at the close . . . --Shakespeare, Richard II 

Not only in Shakespeare’s time but through the ages we humans have marked the end of those who are dear to us or who have distinguished themselves through special attainment. And more often than not, there is “music at the close.” Throughout history and across cultures, from the funeral odes of ancient Greece to the jazz dirges performed by bands marching alongside hearses to the cemeteries of New Orleans, music has played an important role in rituals for the deceased. Among its many other cherished qualities, music possesses an extraordinary ability to give cathartic expression to our griefs, to intimate hope and continuance, to comfort us in times of loss.

One special kind of musical elegy is that which composers have written for esteemed colleagues. Verdi initially conceived his famous Requiem as an homage to another great Italian opera composer, Rossini, on the first anniversary of his death. The Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski wrote his beautiful Musique funèbre to honor the late Béla Bartók. And for centuries, French musicians have used the term “tombeau” to denote a composition written to honor a deceased colleague (Maurice Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin is a familiar modern example).

But the tradition of such works is even older than these examples indicate. One of the most famous musical laments for a deceased composer dates to the late 15th century. This is the motet Nymphes des bois, by the great Renaissance composer Josquin des Prez. It was occasioned by the death of Josquin’s teacher, Johannes Ockeghem, in 1497. Ockeghem (c. 1410-1497) was highly regarded as a singer and as a composer, so much so that he was widely acknowledged by his contemporaries as the foremost musician of his generation. He was also greatly admired for his honesty, loyalty, and the quality of his friendship.

            Josquin’s elegy for his mentor combines two texts. One is a French poem that mourns Ockeghem’s passing and instructs prominent composers of the day (himself included) to don funereal vestments and weep, “for you have lost your good father.” In counterpoint to this, in slower rhythms, the bass voices intone verses that open the Latin Requiem Mass, the liturgy for the dead. Such combining of different texts--secular and liturgical, and in different languages--was a common feature of vocal composition during the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance and a literary analogy to the musical counterpoint, the elaborate entwining of distinct vocal melodies that was a hallmark of composition at that time.

For this, medieval and Rennaisance motets, of which Nymphes des bois is a late example, stand among the most complex combinations of poetry and music ever created, their intricate weaving of different texts and vocal lines bearing testament to the intellectual rigor that their composers brought to matters of artistic design. Yet through all its ingenious compositional artifice, Josquin’s lament for Ockeghem touches us deeply and directly, its lines and harmonies producing a dolorous affect entirely suited to its purpose.

            From one of the earliest extant examples of a musical tombeau, we turn to a recent one. During the last two decades, the Hungarian composer György Kurtág has emerged as one of the most original voices in contemporary composition. Kurtág himself, who turns 80 later this month, is partly responsible for the belated arrival of this status. He has produced a relatively small body of work, and for years worked primarily as a pianist and teacher rather than as a composer. But since the mid-1980s Kurtág has gained increasing recognition in the music world for his intense, concentrated, and highly expressive music. Performers such as the soprano Dawn Upshaw have taken to championing his work, and he recently was awarded the prestigious Grawemeyer Award, widely considered the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in Music Composition.

            Kurtág was born in Lugos, a small town near the historically fluid border between Hungary and Romania, in 1926. As a boy he studied piano and, somewhat later, composition. In 1946 he moved to Budapest, where he continued his studies at the renowned Academy of Music. A year in Paris, where he attended courses taught by Olivier Messiaen and also studied psychology and architecture, greatly expanded his intellectual horizons and prompted a thorough rethinking of his ideas on composition.

            From the mid-1950s, Kurtág worked as a pianist and taught piano and chamber music at the Academy of Music. He retired from most of those activities in 1986, and since then has devoted nearly all his efforts to composition. His growing international reputation has led to tenures as composer-in-residence with the Berlin Philharmonic (1993-94), with the Vienna Konzerthaus (1995), in the Netherlands (1996-98), in Berlin again (1998-99), and most recently in Paris.  

            It is telling of Kurtág’s slow, patient development as a composer that he wrote his first work for full orchestra only in 1994. This is Stele, the product of his year-long stint as composer-in-residence with the Berlin Philharmonic. The composition’s title is a Greek word referring to stone tablets carved in ancient times as monuments to prominent persons after their deaths. Among the classical Greeks, the bestowal of a stele was considered a singularly high honor. Kurtág’s work was prompted by the death of a valued colleague, the Hungarian composer and conductor András Mihály, in September 1993. Kurtág, who had already composed an Hommage à András Mihály, op. 13, in 1978, then wrote a piano piece entitled In Memoriam András Mihály as a tribute to the late musician. Sensing a larger potential in this music, he subsequently reworked it as the basis for the final section of Stele, written for the Berlin Philharmonic.

            The piece unfolds in three movements, which are connected to form an unbroken span of music. Kurtág begins with a striking gesture: a widely spaced sonority that wobbles in and out of tune, as the players are instructed to alter slightly the pitch of the sustained tone each sounds. From this initial gesture emerges quiet, slowly undulating, plaintive lines, beginning with the clarinets and proliferating throughout the orchestra to form a dense web of expressive counterpoint.

            Kurtág heads the second movement “Lamentoso-disperato,” and a desperate cry indeed emerges from the orchestra, with clashing rhythms and terrifying eruptions of massed instrumental sound. Here, the sound of the cimbalom, the traditional Hungarian dulcimer, adds a distinctive aural color.

            After the frenzied outburst of this central movement, the conclusion conveys almost an austere formality. Here chords in five-fold repetitions resound among different instrumental groups at varied speeds, alternating with quietly sustained sonorities and a brief recollection of the plaintive melodic lines of the opening movement.

Of course, not all music of mourning is related to the loss of composers and teachers. Indeed, most are not. Such is the case with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Requiem. But who or what did Mozart intend this music to elegize? That question has occupied Mozart scholars and biographers for nearly two centuries, its definitive answer coming only after diligent investigation into this work’s tangled and mysterious history. That history is, briefly, as follows:

In July 1791, an anonymous gentleman sent a messenger to Mozart and through him requested the composition of a Requiem mass. His commission stipulated, somewhat peculiarly, that the composer attempt to discover neither the occasion for the work’s performance nor his patron’s identity. Mozart accepted the assignment and in October, with several other obligations finally behind him, began concentrated work on the piece. But by November 20 he had fallen seriously ill and took to bed. Two weeks later, on December 5, he died, his work on the mass only partly done. Not wishing to forfeit the fee that had accompanied the Requiem commission, Constanze Weber Mozart, the composer’s widow, asked one of her husband’s students, Franz Xaver Süssmayr, to complete the score. Thanks to his efforts, she was able to deliver the mass as promised.

Mozart was scarcely in his grave before various persons began to speculate on the coincidence of his composing a Mass for the Dead while he himself was fatally ill, and to embellish, in light of this, what they knew about his final days. As a result, no work of Mozart’s has acquired so heavy a gloss of legend and romantic fiction. It has been proposed that the composer was beset with presentiments of death even before he began writing the Requiem and became convinced that he was actually writing his own funeral music; that the messenger who brought the commission was “a tall, thin, grave‑looking man,” and that Mozart believed that he was actually a spectral emissary from the next world; that the composer worked feverishly at the Requiem on his death bed, dictating passages with his dying breath, or had the pen with which he was writing fall from his hand as he sank into a final coma.

            A great deal of this is, at best, only circumstantially supported by what we know of Mozart’s final weeks, and a number of scholars have disputed key points of the legend. In particular, they cite evidence to suggest that far from suffering a long slow decline, Mozart seems to have been in good health until shortly before his end, making any premonitions unreasonable and unlikely. Ultimately, though, nothing about the composer’s state of mind during the time he composed the Requiem can be conclusively proven.

            We do know, however, that Mozart’s anonymous benefactor was one Count Franz Georg Walsegg, a dilettante musician who indulged in the dubious practice of commissioning works from competent composers and passing them off as his own. He had lost his wife, and the Requiem he purchased from Mozart was to be performed in her memory at his estate, the Count taking credit for its composition. Mozart suspected nothing of his intentions.

            Further controversy has surrounded Süssmayr’s completion of the score, which entailed composition of the Sanctus and Benedictus sections and parts of the Lacrymosa and Agnus Dei. Defense of his work includes the not fully documented hypothesis that a sheaf of papers Constanze allegedly gave Süssmayr after he began work on the score must have contained sketches by Mozart. On the other hand, we have Beethoven’s blunt assertion that “If Mozart did not write this music, then the man who wrote it was a Mozart.” Others, however, have disputed Beethoven’s opinion, pointing to errors in counterpoint as well as what they perceive as a lower level of inspiration in the sections fashioned by Süssmayr.