Trostlieder in Widerwärtigkeit des Kriegs
- Submitting institution
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Brunel University London
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 050-188393-9745
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- December
- Year
- 2015
- URL
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https://figshare.com/s/be097e37c4db837e1e4e
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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3 - Music
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The work is a setting for seven solo voices of texts from Martin Opitz’s Trostgedichte in Widerwertigkeit deß Kriegs (1633) and was commissioned by EXAUDI as a companion piece for some of the Geistliche Chormusik (1648) of Heinrich Schütz (1615-72). Opitz (1597-1639) writes about the impact of the Thirty Years War on north-eastern Germany. The devastation of this period was echoed in 1945 when, at the end of the Second World War, the Red Army arrived in this territory, an event of personal significance for me: my mother was caught up in this conflict. My aim was to write music that might represent the ‘awfulness of war’; as Opitz says in the words which open the Trostlieder, ‘May my tongue burn with passion.’
Opitz’s poem is in four ‘books’ and consists of 2318 lines, consistently rhyming in couplets. My first task was to reduce this to a text in which each of the four Trostlieder sets just 44 lines. Opitz’s poetic metre is Alexandrine throughout and my music preserves this inexorable rhythm.
The history of text-setting in western art music since 1945 has been one in which composers have tended to impose their own rhythmic structures on the texts they set. Although I wanted to foreground the 12-beat pattern of the Alexandines the third of the Trostlieder deliberately evoked the more flamboyant Italian madrigalian style of Monteverdi, with whom Heinrich Schütz studied, further refracted through reference to the disjunct solo vocal writing of Luigi Nono’s Canto sospeso (1956); consequently, Opitz’s metre is overwhelmed by the increasingly contrapuntal vocal writing. Nevertheless, the music falls into twelve clearly delineated sections, echoing the twelve feet of the Alexandrine.
The Trostlieder were premiered by EXAUDI in the Wigmore, London in December 2015 and subsequently recorded by EXAUDI in July 2018 for a forthcoming CD.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
