Word: penderecki
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...worst moments seem to fascinate Poland's avant-garde composer Krzysztof Penderecki. In his Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, Dies Irae (an oratorio in memory of the dead of Auschwitz) and The Passion and Death of Jesus Christ According to St. Luke, Penderecki treated mass annihilation and murder with moving intensity, stretching the limits of orchestral and vocal range so far that he had to invent new notational symbols for his score (TIME, Oct. 14, 1966). Thus it was only appropriate that for his first opera he chose as his subject a tale of mass hysteria and political...
Hell on Earth. Penderecki based The Devils of Loudun on both Aldous Huxley's historical essay and John Whiting's play The Devils. The libretto sketches the facts surrounding the torture and execution of a Jesuit priest in a 17th century French provincial town. Sister Jeanne of the Angels, prioress of St. Ursula's Convent, asks Father Urbain Grandier (sung by Baritone Andre Hiolski) to become the cloister's confessor. When the worldly, sensual priest declines the offer, Sister Jeanne has a series of hysterical sexual hallucinations that soon infect other nuns in the convent. Eventually...
Boos and Bravos. Penderecki scored the opera for an 80-voice chorus and a massive orchestra: 32 woodwind and brass instruments, 42 strings, an organ, harmonium, electric bass guitar and a diverse array of percussion instruments, including timpani and musical saw. Though it produces the now familiar range of Penderecki sound-semi-tones and quarter tones, tone clusters, glissandi and primitive knocking noises-the orchestra plays a secondary role to the chorus, which is constantly busy humming, singing neo-Gregorian chant, screaming, laughing, muttering and yelping...
Some critics complained that Penderecki had wasted an expense of talent in illustrating a bizarre footnote to history, and had failed to provide his opera with any sense of contemporary relevance. The audience response at the Hamburg premiere was a blend of boos and bravos, although applause predominated at a different production of the work in Stuttgart last week. Penderecki was unfazed. Isn't opera an archaic form for modern composers? he was asked. "Only people who don't have the brains to write one think so," was his answer...
...released in the fall are Philadelphia versions of the Mahler First Symphony and Mendelssohn's Elijah. After that will come DeFalla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain with Rubinstein, Mahler's Second Symphony, Bach's St. Matthew Passion, and several contemporary works, including Krzystof Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima...