Programme Note Against the War

[CONCEPT] Against the War is a musical reflection on the cycles of war and peace that characterize world history. The concert begins and ends with two a cappella choruses that powerfully express the human longing for peace. Between those two points, war is portrayed in various forms. In Igor Stravinsky and Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz’s L’Histoire du Soldat, a soldier is portrayed who returns from the war in a state of despair, having lost touch with the world and ultimately even selling his soul to the devil. In their cantatas, Hanns Eisler and Ignazio Silone harshly denounce how a country ruled by potentates can rapidly slide into a culture of fear and violence. Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Berlin Requiem shows how often ordinary people are the greatest victims of war and how easily their suffering is subsequently forgotten. But the concert ends with an expression of hope: Arnold Schönberg’s “Peace on Earth!”

[EISLER’S CANTATAS] Hanns Eisler’s two cantatas are based on texts by the Italian revolutionary politician Secondino Tranquilli, who wrote under the pseudonym Ignazio Silone (1900–1974). Today, Silone is an illustrious unknown, but in the years following World War II, he was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. The texts of the two cantatas are exceptionally incisive: the first denounces how quickly a country can change when its leaders rush headlong into war; the second describes how totalitarian regimes can disrupt an entire society by creating a climate of fear. Eisler opted for a rather austere musical setting. As a result, the text remains clearly intelligible, and the message comes across all the more powerfully.

[BERLIN REQUIEM] The Berlin Requiem is not a requiem in the traditional, liturgical sense of the word. Rather, it is a secular work, intended primarily as a social and political critique. The text and music have a predominantly harsh and unyielding character, except perhaps in “Marterl,” where the waltzing music takes on a painfully ironic undertone. Other sections allude to religious musical traditions, such as chorales and Bach’s Passions, but cast them in a different light. For most of his requiem, Weill opts for a rather harsh, dark sound, dominated by male voices and wind instruments. The compositional style itself was deliberately kept accessible, as Weill belonged to a generation of interwar composers who sought to reach a broad audience. Immediately following the requiem is a lament by Rudolf Mauersberger that serves as a further reflection on the piece by Weill and Brecht. “Why?” is the central question, followed by a plea to “be allowed to come home again.” After the relative harshness of Weill’s music, Mauersberger’s harmonies sound resonant and inviting. Musically, the return to peace seems to be set in motion here.

[PEACE] The two choral works on the theme of “peace” in this program come from completely different perspectives. Kurt Hessenberg wrote his piece shortly after World War II, in a rather conservative, tonal style that reflects his longing for simplicity and tranquility. Schönberg’s work is nearly forty years older and dates from a period when the composer was exploring the boundaries of tonality. This is very clearly audible in this piece, which searches and struggles, but ultimately finds refuge in the comforting beauty of a harmonious final chord.

Pieter Bergé