Maciejewski: Requiem

Requiem A History and Analysis by Roman Maciejewski

Deeply depressed by the horrors, destruction and atrocities of the Second World War, I felt the urge to contribute to the efforts of peace loving people by arousing a general awareness of the tragic absurdity of war. As a musician, I decided to try to make this contribution in the form of a musical work, which by its scope and intensity, would make an emotional impact on the listener and direct his attention to the ideological motif of this work. Being convinced that lack of respect for life is due to ignorance of the universal order and the divine law of love, I dedicated my Requiem to the victims of human ignorance and in the first place to those who died in wars of all times. As a motto for the Requiem I chose the words of Christ, dying on the cross: "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do." I started to work on the Requiem in 1943 and working at intervals, finished it in 1958. I wrote the Requiem, contrary to the contemporary trend and without regard to the economical difficulties of its production, for a large orchestra, a large choir and four soloists - the ideal number of performers being 250 singers and musicians. The world premiere of the Requiem took place at the International Festival of Contemporary music in Warsaw in 1960 under my direction, after long and careful preparations and help of the Polish Radio, which did not spare energy nor money to bring about the performance. This performance, the American premiere of the Requiem, became a reality thanks to the unstinting dedication, patience and great efforts of Dr. Roger Wagner, director of the splendid Master Chorale and Sinfonia Orchestra. I am in deep gratitude to him for this achievement. The purpose of the music in Requiem is to express, as fully and completely as possible, the emotional, conceptual and philosophical content of the word, and to illustrate the visual and acoustic material of the text. Although the music never leaves the word, at times it becomes more independent, like in the triple fugue of the Kyrie and in the Amen. The Requiem is built in long and high arches in contrast with the shortness of breath of contemporary men and its expression in music. The text of the Requiem is the unaltered liturgical, Latin text of the following parts of the "Mass for the dead": lntroitus, Kyrie, Graduate et Tractus and Dies irae. Fascinated by the poetic and dramatic grandeur of the Dies irae I concentrated on an extensive musical interpretation of this part of the Mass, leaving for a later date the composition of the remaining parts. The Requiem consists of choral parts, as well as parts for the four soloists with or without the choir (The four Lamentations) and orchestral parts (Prelude and Interludes). The structural frame of the whole work was established by conveying to the soloists the interpretation of all sections of the liturgical text in "I" form and thereby lending to their parts a lyrical quality, whereas all the descriptive and dramatic sections are interpreted by the choir. The four soloists personify four emotionally different types of humans, facing, in the name of the resurrected humanity, the Judge-Creator. The opening prayer has its counterpart in the concluding prayer Pie Jesu. The following orchestral prelude starts with a long melodic line of the English horn, containing in its sections all the principal themes of the Requiem. The Introitus has the A (choir), B (basso solo), A form. The first fugue of the Kyrie in four parts symbolizes the plea for mercy sounding from the four corners of the world. The Christe eleison (soloists) is conceived as four individual pleas, the following triple fugue (Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison) as a general plea for mercy. In the Graduale et Tractus (usually omitted by composers), I was inspired by the Byzantine interpretation of this part in the form of a florid chant of a soloist with the choir as background. At the start of the composition of the Dies irae, I was hypnotized by the vision of the Last Judgment by Michelangelo and subsequently, I tried to convey some of its power to my musical interpretation of this magnificent liturgical text. I had for the different parts of the Dies irae some visual interpretations with their counterpart in music: the great Resurrection, starting with convulsions of the interior of the earth, in the lower worlds of matter, spreads to the higher worlds of terrified living beings, which propelled by strange sounds of horns (Tuba mirum, the seven signals of the Apocalypse), grow from small groups to an all-encompassing procession towards the scene of the last judgment (Liber scriptus). I conceived this central and most dramatic part of the Dies irae as a symbol for the return of all creation to its Creator. The musical painting of the scene of the last Judgment was accomplished with a touch of humor, evoked by the authors Medieval, anthropomorphic conception of the judge and his entourage. The Inter oves is musically interpreted as a picture of Heaven and the Confutatis as a picture of Hell. The Lacrimosa lent itself to a picture of weeping women. The final Amen, originally for twelve part choir and percussion, builds up from p, through the principal themes of the Requiem, to a ff Tutti, affirmative and resounding with hope and joyful exultation. I tried in the Requiem to establish a balance between the three groups: the choir, the soloists and the orchestra, none of them being predominant or less important. The choir parts are treated homophonically and polyphonically, depending on the content of the words. My harmonical means are based on the natural, acoustic phenomenon of overtones. The long row of overtones provides unlimited possibilities of variations of colors, lights, shadows and darkness. I use them never losing the firm ground of the first four overtones. This procedure fixed my harmony in the solid frame of tonality and being in accordance with the physical and physiological lows makes it possible for me to be in peace with nature and humans.

Archival Recording