- 2018-09-17
A Pilgrimage and a Requiem: In Search of Lasting Peace
Read Thomas May's program notes to find out more about The Mozart Requiem & Shawn Kirchner's "Songs of Ascent."
By Thomas May
Can a work of art ever be truly complete? How do we even assess “completeness”? This season-opening program juxtaposes two large-scale compositions — one contemporary, the other a repertoire classic — whose origins prompt fascinating questions of intention and creative process. Indeed, the fact that Mozart was unable to complete his Requiem before his untimely death has long been entangled with our evaluation of it, only enhancing its special status as a masterpiece. The desire to understand what Mozart wanted to convey — and to what extent he was cut short — is hardly limited to musicologists.
Shawn Kirchner’s Songs of Ascent has been performed around the country ever since the Master Chorale premiered it in 2015. While it marked the culmination of his three-year tenure as the Swan Family Composer-in-Residence, Kirchner began later to feel that the work was not complete — that is, that he had disregarded his original creative intuition when he created the original score. On this program we hear the Master Chorale premiere of Kirchner’s revised, more-fully-worked-out version of Songs of Ascent.
Grant Gershon, Kiki & David Gindler Artistic Director of the Master Chorale, remarks on some aspects that Songs shares with Mozart’s Requiem: “There’s a sense of journey and development that both pieces carry you through. Each has very overt dramatic qualities: the soloists are at times in dialogue with each other but at times even seem to be in conflict. And both works use a multifaceted approach to setting sacred texts, so there’s a huge amount of variety.”
Songs of Ascent takes its name from the traditional epithet for a subset of 15 of the Biblical Psalms. This group, Psalms 120–134, is known collectively as “A Song of Ascents” which is the phrase that appears as a superscript over each — “ascents” here referring to steps or stations (as on a journey), that is, to a pilgrimage. Scholars have come up with multiple interpretations for this metaphorically suggestive phrase, including musical ones (were they sung at an ascending pitch?). Many believe that it refers to an actual pilgrimage undertaken to the Temple in Jerusalem. Leonard Bernstein drew on two Psalms from this group for his Chichester Psalms, which concludes with Psalm 133’s vision of peace and reconciliation.
It was as he began his Master Chorale residency that Kirchner initially conceived of developing this material into a choral cycle. One reason he was strongly attracted to their implicit message comes from the composer’s own spiritual tradition. He was raised a pacifist, growing up as a member of the Church of the Brethren, an historic peace church that, explains Kirchner, has joined with the Quakers and the Mennonites in the United States to support conscientious objectors ever since the Revolutionary War. In fact, at college he majored not in music but in Peace Studies, focusing on theories and philosophies of non-violence: “This is what I’ve been thinking about since my young years: issues of peace and war, cycles of violence and healing.”
Kirchner also had in mind a scene from the Gospels when he began organizing the larger narrative arc of Songs of Ascent with the intent of dramatizing how estrangement must be healed before reconciliation is possible. This is the scene in which Jesus instructs people who have come to the Temple to offer gifts: “First go away, be reconciled to your brother; and then having done so, come, offer your gift” (Matthew 5:24).
But this process of reconciling is easier said than done. How do we get there, particularly in our era of constant hostility and rage, so much of it stoked by religion itself? “I’ve had to grapple with the whole idea of religion and its political dimensions,” Kirchner has observed. “Joseph Campbell (American mythologist, writer, and lecturer) talks about the need for a center, and you can see that every tradition has a sacred place to which the people return. At its best, this return brings wholeness to the individual and the community by balancing temporal concerns with the eternal, and individual concerns with the communal. But obviously the danger comes when a strong identification with a particular tradition is not paired with an equally strong respect for other traditions. The ongoing conflicts we've had for millennia made me imagine Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — all of which hold Jerusalem as a sacred center — as estranged brothers, and the pilgrimage to Jerusalem as a quest for peace.”
While first composing Songs of Ascent, Kirchner had intended to represent these estranged brothers symbolically, with the tenor and baritone as vying soloists. But he left most of these ideas on the cutting-room floor, focusing instead on a structure of seven movements, each of which ascends by a third. It ended up proving too tidy and sounding too “euphonious.” The element of conflict itself was underrepresented. “The audience couldn’t be expected to intuit what my intentions were,” Kirchner explains. “The piece lacked a sufficient arc, so I realized I needed to bring out the process of estrangement and reconciliation more dramatically, making it clear that there had been deep transgressions that needed to be faced before there could be reconciliation.”
Kirchner’s process of revision has affected four sections of the original score. Two of these involve expansions and two are outright additions (the tenor and baritone duets in what are now movements 5 and 7). The revised Songs of Ascent (which sets the King James translation of these texts) unfolds in 10 movements. They comprise three larger parts.
Movements 1–4 posit a kind of exposition and depict the community in its intact state. The opening conjures a patriarch figure (the baritone solo who sings Psalm 132), with prominent harp to suggest his association with King David. The chorus’s role in the second movement (Psalm 122) is to voice what Kirchner terms “a joyful anticipation of reunion,” while the soprano solo in the third movement sings Psalm 131 (the text Bernstein set at the end of Chichester Psalms) to express “the vision of unity and harmoniousness and of submission rather than rebellion.” Part One culminates in the fugal choral movement 4 (Psalms 127 and 128), which ends with an a cappella setting.
The drama of brokenness, suffering, and conflict — bursting in all the more forcefully after the tranquil a cappella ending — is foregrounded in the middle part (movements 5–8) . Kirchner recalls that the problematic righteousness of Psalm 124 (“with God on our side”) had made him resist setting it when he composed the first version. But while revising, he realized that he could set the tenor and baritone soloists at odds, so that they are singing essentially identical material to each other in a competitive way, with “the bravura and braggadocio of alpha males bellowing and beating their chests and leading their people into warfare with each other. It represents the same kind of thinking that gets us nowhere.”
The women’s choral voices offer “a feminist reading of Psalm 120” in movement 6. “They are the ones who are left trying to pick up the pieces after the men have gone off and created this situation.” The dueling tenor and baritone return in the seventh movement (Psalm 129), “but now they acknowledge their suffering” — though this very acknowledgment can be used to justify the cycle of violence. Kirchner uses his string orchestra with remarkable precision here, noting that the situation of violence in the Middle East suggested musical imagery. The first violins unleash lightning-like figures, “like drone attacks out of the sky,” while deep below, the basses suggest “an IED over which a truck drives.” The middle string voices become enmeshed in turbulent figures: “almost like PTSD, the nightmare of people who have been bombed, or who have done the bombing.”
The turning point of the entire cycle comes in movement 8 (Psalm 130), in which the community responds, giving full voice to the experience of suffering we heard from the tenor and baritone soloists and from the women. “The community is helping the baritone and tenor soloists realize that there is a way forward of forgiveness, a way to escape from the nightmare cycle of revenge, of reconnecting with the positive part of your tradition and finding your purpose again, after being lost. Because any culture that uses warfare to achieve its means has lost its way.”
Part Three (movements 9 and 10) then depicts the longed-for healing and reconciliation that “had only been implied in the first version of the work.” The actual pivot point occurs in movement 9 (Psalms 121 and 126). The trio setting of Psalm 126 at the end (also used by Brahms in A German Requiem) calls on the tenor and baritone, now singing in harmony, to join the soprano. The vision expressed in the last movement (Psalms 133 and 134) has thus been prepared for and contextualized. “That is the most important reason why I made these changes to my piece: to serve the dramatic intent,” says Kirchner. “It needed greater contrast, greater extremes. The sublime parts feel more sublime if they are coming out of angst.”
REACHING FOR THE LIGHT ETERNAL: MOZART’S REQUIEM
A conflation of feelings of angst — indeed, sheer terror — with the sublime might describe Mozart’s Requiem as well. “Since I last conducted it here in 2009, I’m aware more than ever of how unique this piece really is,” says Gershon . “While it has elements you can trace back to his earlier compositions — not only some of his liturgical works but moments like Don Giovanni’s descent into hell — the overall tone is so groundbreaking that you can’t help but reflect on where Mozart was going artistically.”
The composer was, of course, cut short by death before he could complete the score, dying early on the morning of December 5, 1791, before he had reached his 36th birthday. The official cause of death was ambiguously given as “severe miliary fever.”
“Our collective understandings of [the Requiem] derive from our imaginative … engagement with fictional, quasi-fictional, and factual circumstances of composition to a degree unrivaled perhaps by any other work in the Western canon,” writes the contemporary Mozart expert Simon P. Keefe. These strands are indeed so interwoven that even a capsule summary of which parts are "pure Mozart" of the completed score we usually hear — the standard edition prepared by one of Mozart’s protégés, Franz Xaver Süssmayr — is not so easy to come by.
In 1791 Mozart accepted a generous commission by an Austrian Count to compose a Requiem for the latter’s late wife. The existing autograph manuscript reveals that Mozart wrote music for these parts of the work: the Introitus and Kyrie (linked into a single movement), and the Offertorium (Domine Jesu and Hostias). Only the opening movement was drafted out in full score, while the rest exists mostly as shorthand sketches (vocal parts and only continuo line), although here and there Mozart jotted down ideas for instrumentation. Most dramatically, the page for the Lacrimosa breaks off after the first eight bars, with the full string instrumentation written out at the beginning.
Mozart’s widow Constanze enlisted Süssmayr to complete the commission, but we can’t know how much other material he had to work with (ditto Joseph Eybler, to whom she initially gave the task but who quickly bowed out). The parts that were missing from Mozart’s partial manuscript, which therefore had to be completed, included the rest of the Lacrimosa (along with orchestration of the entire Sequence and of the Offertorium), all of the Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei, and the concluding Lux aeterna (here, though, Süssmayr obviously recycled Mozart’s music for the Introitus and Kyrie).
As for the orchestration, this is vintage late Mozart: strings and basso continuo with a darker woodwind palette of basset horns (a type of clarinet, Mozart’s beloved wind instrument) plus bassoons (no flutes to soften the soundscape), plus a solemn brass component of trumpets and trombones and timpani, used with great economy. The overall musical style, as Gershon points out, represents a fascinating synthesis of elements we know from earlier in Mozart’s career with the voice he had been recently exploring in such works as The Magic Flute. Also significant are the influences of his study of Baroque counterpoint and of traditional liturgical funeral music (including echoes of works by Handel as well as Salzburg colleagues from his past).
Mozart stages a drama of contrasts between darkness and light, inescapable despair and lyrical consolation, threat and hope: a drama whose tone is announced immediately by the solemn and relentless processional that opens the work: the fact of death itself in music. Rays suggesting possible redemption intermittently shine through, perhaps most movingly in the Recordare, with its plea to be remembered. “Going well beyond an emphasis on any single model, the [Requiem] essentially represents a folding of Handelian and Bachian ideas and principles into Mozart’s very own language of music. This concept penetrates every page,” writes the musicologist Christoph Wolff in Mozart at the Gateway to His Fortune. Overall, he concludes, the Requiem “creates the awareness of both artistic consummation and irretrievable loss, a loss clearly extending beyond the Requiem fragment as such and casting a light on the much larger fragment of an abbreviated creative life.”
Thomas May, program annotator for the Los Angeles Master Chorale, writes about the arts and blogs at memeteria.com
