Word: gerhard
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Climate of Fear. Gerhard (TIME, Jan. 18, 1963) approached the novel almost piously, and his libretto lost little of the power of Camus' bitter wisdom: as in the novel, the rats may be real, but the plague is only a shadow of the greater horrors man makes for himself. "The plague," said Conductor Antal Dorati, "is all diseases of the mind, every dictatorship, every war, and there is no real freedom as long as there are pestilences. The rats may come again to the happy city. This is the message...
Making the point in music required a storm of inventiveness, and Gerhard, 67, proved himself to be a resourceful composer. Violin bows drawn across cymbals' edges make their pale, tortured protest as they create an eerie, shimmering climate of fear. A nail file raked across piano strings evokes wind against telegraph wires. The murmur and patter of the rats in the streets is sounded by cellists tapping clamped strings...
Such stunts were scarcely noticed beneath the spell cast by the premiere. With Dorati conducting the BBC Symphony and Chorus and Actor Stephen Murray narrating the dark libretto, Gerhard's difficult music got the intense performance it requires and deserves. The audience-having held its emotional breath for 40 minutes-re sponded with a sustained ovation...
...Shutter's Creak. The Plague is neither as sustained nor complex as Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, but it invites comparison to that modern masterwork in its personal comment on a desperate universal theme. A Spanish exile who lives in near hermitry outside Cambridge, Gerhard spent more than a year fashioning his brilliantly distilled-libretto from Stuart Gilbert's translation of the novel, then found the music for his words in six more months. The score has only the merest wisps of melody, but the music achieves some deeply stirring and unnerving moments -as when an orchestral...
...Gerhard's affinity for Camus first led him to consider writing an opera based on the late French author's bleak first novel, The Stranger, and he still plans to do the work-if he can win a commis sion. But while lying ill two years ago, the musical approach to the message of The Plague struck him. "It is man's bestiality to man, and the pestilence is the fight against terror." That message, he says, "took my imagination by storm...