Requiem Canticles

(for orchestra, chorus, and soloists)

composed 1965-66

by Igor Stravinsky

born at Oranienbaum, Russia, on June 17, 1882

died in New York on April 6, 1971

Stravinsky began work on his Requiem Canticles in March 1965 and completed it in Hollywood on August 13, 1966. It was first performed at Prince-ton University under the direction of Robert Craft on October 8, 1966.

This work runs about 15 minutes in performance. Stravinsky scored it for an orchestra of 3 flutes (third doubling piccolo), alto flute, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani (2 performers), percussion (xylophone, vibraphone, chimes), piano, celesta, harp, and strings, plus alto and bass soloists, and mixed chorus.

The Cleveland Orchestra is performing Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles for the first time at this weekend’s concerts.

Requiem Canticles was played at Igor Stravinsky’s funeral in 1971, his widow commenting that “he and I knew he was writing it for himself.” The composer’s pupil and longtime assistant Robert Craft described the work’s closing Postlude as “the chord of Death, followed by silence, the tolling of bells, and again silence, all thrice repeated, then the three final chords of Death alone.”

Stravinsky was eighty-four when he completed Requiem Canticles. Although he lived another five years, with the exception of one song (The Owl and the Pussy-Cat to Edward Lear’s text), the Requiem Canticles remained the last music he ever wrote. It was also the last in a series of choral works to Latin sacred texts that Stravinsky penned across his lifetime, starting with the Symphony of Psalms (1930) and including Mass (1947), Canticum sacrum (1955), and Threni: The Lamentations of Jeremiah (1957).

The Lure of Serialism

In many of his works from the 1950s and ’60s, Stravinsky increasingly turned toward serial composition. This technique was closely associated with the three early 20th-century composers Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern, collectively known as the “Second Viennese School.” All three had died by the time of Stravinsky’s latest change of style (this late-life turn to serialism was not the first time Stravinsky had veered in a new compositional direction). So why did Stravinsky embrace the methods of composers who were until then seen as his musical opposites? According to some, he was eager to follow a trend that was then considered fashionable in American academic circles. That, however, seems hardly sufficient as an explanation. Stravinsky had his internal artistic reasons, for he was interested in the concision and the meticulous, every-single-note-counts approach that was one of the hallmarks of serialism.

The serial method has had some rather bad press in recent times, but contrary to what some people have asserted, “serial” does not have to mean “cerebral.” It is an alternative way, after classical tonality, to establish meaningful relationships among the notes of the scale; a true composer can make those relationships audible and use them to create a new sense of balance in his or her work. Ultimately, what matters in both tonal and serial composition is how the basic principles are applied in each individual case — the method is only as good or bad as the composer employing it.

In Stravinsky’s hands, serialism became a perfect vehicle for the “reticent expressionism” of his later works. Even as he turned toward spiritual matters, he rejected all sentimentality and refused to wear his heart on his sleeve. He wasn’t about to dramatize the Last Judgment in his “Dies irae” the way Berlioz or Verdi had done in their 19th-century Requiems. He wrote instead what he himself called a “vest-pocket Requiem,” offering personal glosses, as it were, on selected crucial moments in the Mass of the Dead and disregarding the rest.

Stravinsky’s melodic and rhythmic gestures in the Requiem Canticles may not conform to classical expectations, yet they have a compelling logic of their own. What the serial method allowed Stravinsky to do was to create brief gestures that established their individuality after only three or four notes. Being a genius, he then knew how to make those gestures speak. And for all the reticence and anti-Romanticism, the Requiem Canticles is not exactly an unemotional work, though Stravinsky was extremely economical in the means he used to get his message across.

The insistent, palpitating string figures of the instrumental prelude, juxtaposing repeated notes with short micro-melodies, effectively set the stage for the brief prayer that follows (“Exaudi”). In the “Dies irae,” a single chord is enough to express the horrors of the Day of Wrath. The second and third lines of the text are not even sung but only spoken — or rather whispered — by the chorus, to the sparsest of orchestral accompaniments. The “wondrous trumpet” — actually, a trio of two trumpets and trombone — soon morphs into a pair of bassoons, accompanying the bass soloist. The subsequent instrumental interlude is dominated by a quartet of flutes — three regular flutes and an alto flute. It is interesting, let us note in passing, that Stravinsky used flutes and bassoons prominently in the Requiem Canticles, but left out the other two members of the woodwind family (oboes and clarinets).

In “Rex tremendae,” Stravinsky de-emphasizes the contrast most other composers had insisted on between God’s fearsome power and the anguished soul’s plea for salvation. Both ideas are set in the same angular melodic style, only the orchestration changes with the text, suddenly becoming thinner. The “Lacrimosa” introduces the contralto soloist with a lyrical flourish on the first word, followed by a declamation with a mosaic-like orchestral accompaniment. In the “Libera me,” Stravinsky has four individual voices intone the words in a kind of harmonized chant, while the chorus, once again, speaks them in a whisper.

The crown of the entire work, however, is the Postlude, in which large blocks of sonorities played by woodwinds, piano, and harp, alternate with the more fluid harmonic progressions of the celesta, chimes, and vibraphone, which play the role of a set of non-traditional funeral bells. It is hard not to be moved by the last three chords, which end not only this work but stand as a symbolic conclusion of Stravinsky’s entire composing career, which had spanned almost seven decades.

Turangalîla-symphonie

composed 1946-48

by Olivier Messiaen

born in Avignon, France, on December 10, 1908

died in Paris on April 28, 1992

Messiaen wrote his Turangalîla-symphonie between 1946 and 1948, on commission from Serge Koussevitzky and the Koussevitzky Foundation for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. For an explanation of the title, see note below. The first performance took place on December 2, 1949, at Boston’s Symphony Hall with the BSO led by Leonard Bernstein. The soloists were pianist Yvonne Loriod (who would later become Messiaen’s second wife) and Ginette Martenot (whose brother Maurice had invented the ondes).

The 10 movements of Turangalîla run about 75 minutes in performance. Messiaen scored it for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, english horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, 4 horns, piccolo trumpet, 3 trumpets, cornet, 3 trombones, tuba, keyboard glockenspiel, celesta, vibraphone, percussion (triangle, 3 temple blocks, wood block, small Turkish cymbal, suspended cymbal, crash cymbals, Chinese cymbal, tam-tam, tambourine, Provençal tambourine, maracas, snare drum, bass drum, tubular bells), strings, plus solo piano and solo ondes martenot.

The Cleveland Orchestra first performed Turangalîla in October 1973, under the direction of Louis Lane; Messiaen’s wife Yvonne Loriod played the piano solo and her sister Jeanne the ondes martenot. The most recent performances by the Orchestra were led by Franz Welser-Möst in March 2002, with pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Cynthia Millar playing the ondes martenot.

It is well known that Messiaen was a devout Roman Catholic throughout his life. Most of his works have the Catholic faith as their subject matter, with an emphasis, in the 1930s, after Messiaen married his first wife, Claire Delbos, and they had a son, on the Christian interpretation of love. In the song cycle Poèmes pour Mi, for which Messiaen wrote both the music and words, the composer explored the mystical and spiritual connections of the sacrament of marriage. Its sequel, Chants de terre et de ciel (“Songs of Heaven and Earth”), celebrated the mystery of new life. Subsequently, Messiaen engaged in a profound reflection over the medieval legend of Tristan and Yseult. Much later, he explained to the French music critic Claude Samuel what this ancient Celtic legend meant to him:

Messiaen: The legend is the symbol of all great loves and for all the great love poems in literature or in music. . . . I’ve preserved only the idea of a fatal and irresistible love, which, as a rule, leads to death and which, to some extent, invokes death, for it is a love that transcends the body, transcends even the limitations of the mind, and grows to a cosmic scale.

Samuel: Isn’t this notion of human love in contradiction with your religious faith?

Messiaen: Not at all, because a great love is a reflection — a pale reflection, but nevertheless a reflection — of the only genuine love, divine love.

Messiaen left the actual story of Tristan, Yseult, and King Mark out of his concept. As he said: “In no way did I wish to rework Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde or Debussy’s Pelléas, to mention only the two greatest ‘Tristans’ in music.” Instead, he produced a gigantic triptych of works and, with it, the first great synthesis of his compositional career. The trilogy opened with a song cycle for voice and piano, Harawi, closed with Cinq Rechants (“Five Refrains”) for 12 solo voices, and had the monumental Turangalîla-symphonie, for large orchestra, piano, and ondes martenot solos, as its central panel.

Messiaen was always extremely reticent about discussing his personal life. Yet it is known that the beginning of his work on the Tristan legend coincided with the incurable illness of his first wife. It was also around the same time that he first met Yvonne Loriod, an exceptionally gifted pianist who was a member of his class at the Conservatoire and who would eventually become his second wife. The composer, however, was unshakably committed to the sacrament of marriage and could express his feelings only in music. (Messiaen and Loriod married in 1962, three years after Claire Delbos’s death.) The composer never spoke in public about the intense suffering he must have gone through during the years of his “Tristan” trilogy.

Externally, the genesis of Turangalîla is a very happy one. In 1945, Messiaen received a commission from Serge Koussevitzky, who told him: “Choose as many instruments as you desire, write a work as long as you wish and in the style you want.” Koussevitzky set no deadline for the new work. Messiaen worked on his score for two years and completed it on November 29, 1948. Koussevitzky, who was scheduled to conduct the first performance, became ill at the last minute and his assistant, Leonard Bernstein, had to take over. The work was extremely well received and soon became one of the most often-performed new scores in the world, in spite of the huge performing forces required and the enormous technical difficulties of the music.

As Messiaen explained, the title Turangalîla comes from the 13th-century Indian music theorist Sarndageva, who combined two Sanskrit words to describe one particular rhythmic formula. Lîla can mean “play” in a cosmic sense: “the play of creation, of destruction, of reconstruction, the play of life and death.” But it also means “love.” Turanga “is time that runs, like a galloping horse [and] that flows, like sand in an hourglass . . . movement and rhythm.” The work, then, is a play of love, life, and death expressed through movement and rhythm. And very much Messiaen’s personal vision of love, life, and death uniquely expressed.

^{—Peter Laki}