Program
One Hundred Twenty-Third Season
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Riccardo Muti Music Director
Pierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus
Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant
Global Sponsor of the CSO
Thursday, November 14, 2013, at 8:00
Friday, November 15, 2013, at 8:00
Saturday, November 16, 2013, at 8:00
Charles Dutoit Conductor
Tatiana Pavlovskaya Soprano
John Mark Ainsley Tenor
Matthias Goerne Baritone
Chicago Symphony Chorus
Duain Wolfe Chorus Director
Chicago Children’s Chorus
Josephine Lee Artistic Director
Britten
War Requiem, Op. 66
Requiem aeternum
Dies irae
Offertorium
Sanctus
Agnus Dei
Libera me
There will be no intermission.
Performed in honor of the one hundredth anniversary of the composer’s birth on November 22, 1913.
The appearance of the Chicago Symphony Chorus this season is underwritten in part with a generous gift from
Jim and Kay Mabie.
Saturday’s concert is endowed in part by the League of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to 93XRT, Redeye, The Onion, and Metromix for their generous support
as media sponsors of the Classic Encounter Series.
This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
CommeNTS by Phillip Huscher
Benjamin Britten
Born November 22, 1913, Lowestoft, Sussex, England.
Died December 4, 1976, Aldeburgh, England.
War Requiem, op. 66
Roger Burney died aboard
the French submarine
Surcouf in February 1942.
David Gill was killed in
action in the Mediterranean. Michael Halliday
was declared missing in
action in 1944. Piers
Dunkerley was wounded
and taken prisoner during
the Normandy landings in 1944; he was released
at the war’s end, returned to civilian life, and
planned to marry, but killed himself on
June 7, 1959.
Photographs of these four men were found in
an envelope among Benjamin Britten’s belongings after his death. They all knew the composer,
none of them especially well, but to Britten they
were the faces of the dead—hauntingly familiar
victims of war. As he sat down to write a requiem
mass for the rebuilt cathedral in Coventry (the
ComPoSeD
1961–62
FirST PerFormaNCe
May 30, 1962; Saint Michael’s
Cathedral, Coventry, england
FirST CSo PerFormaNCeS
June 27, 1972, Ravinia Festival.
Phyllis Curtin, Robert Tear, and John
Shirley-Quirk as soloists; Chicago
Symphony Chorus (Margaret Hillis,
director), Northwestern university
Chorus and Concert Choir (Margaret
Hillis, director), and Glen ellyn
Children’s Theatre Chorus (Doreen Rao,
director); istván Kertész conducting
the orchestra, György Fischer conducting the chamber orchestra, Margaret
Hillis conducting the children’s chorus
February 13, 14 & 16, 1986, Orchestra
Hall. Margaret Marshall, John Aler, and
Benjamin Luxon as soloists; Chicago
2
original church had been bombed to rubble
during nightly air raids in mid-November 1940),
these four young men brought immediacy to
the vast and unmanageable subject of war. As
the War Requiem took shape, they personalized
the tragedy of battle and helped him never to
lose sight of individual private lives against the
background of world history. It is these four
names, unfamiliar to all but their families and
friends, that Britten put on the dedication page
of his War Requiem.
It was another dead soldier, the victim of an
earlier world war, who gave voice to Britten’s
lifelong pacifist views and provided much of the
text for the Coventry requiem. Wilfred Owen
died in action on November 4, 1918, while
leading his troops across the Sambre Canal
in northeast France, exactly one week before
the Armistice. (His parents didn’t receive the
telegram of their son’s death until November 11,
the news bringing them face to face with grief
Symphony Chorus (Margaret Hillis,
director) and Glen ellyn Children’s
Chorus (Doreen Rao, director); Leonard
Slatkin conducting the orchestra
and chamber orchestra, Doreen Rao
conducting the children’s chorus
moST reCeNT
CSo PerFormaNCeS
May 9, 10 & 11, 2002, Orchestra
Hall. Olga Guriakowa, ian Bostridge,
and Andreas Schmidt as soloists;
Chicago Symphony Chorus (Duain
wolfe, director) and The American
Boychoir (Vincent Metallo, director);
Mstislav Rostropovich conducting the
orchestra, Duain wolfe conducting the
chamber orchestra, Vincent Metallo
conducting the children’s chorus
iNSTrumeNTaTioN
soprano, tenor, and baritone soloists;
a mixed chorus, children’s chorus
(accompanied by organ), a full orchestra, and a chamber orchestra. The main
orchestra consists of three flutes and
piccolo, two oboes and english horn,
three clarinets, e-flat clarinet and bass
clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, six horns, four trumpets, three
trombones and tuba, piano, organ,
timpani, snare drums, tenor drum, bass
drum, tambourine, triangle, cymbals,
castanets, whip, chinese blocks,
gong, bells, vibraphone, glockenspiel,
antique cymbals, and strings. The
chamber orchestra consists of flute
and piccolo, oboe and english horn,
clarinet, bassoon, horn, timpani, snare
drum, bass drum, cymbal, gong, harp,
two violins, viola, cello, and bass.
aPProXimaTe
PerFormaNCe Time
77 minutes
while the rest of England cheered the end of
World War I.) In later years, Owen slowly gained
acclaim for the terse and moving verses he wrote
in the trenches and on the battlefield. Britten
knew him as the greatest of the First World
War poets. He owned a volume of Owen’s work,
and, in 1958, when the BBC radio program
Personal Choice asked him for his favorite poems,
he included Owen’s “Strange Meeting,” the
text he would ultimately use at the end of the
War Requiem. That same year, Britten was
approached by
a member of
the Coventry
Cathedral
Festival,
which wanted
to commission
him to write a
large work to
consecrate the
new cathedral
nearing
completion
next to the
ruins of
the ancient
building.
By the time
Britten began
Poet Wilfred Owen
to compose
the score for
Coventry in the summer of 1960, many deeply
personal strands had come together—the loss
of four friends, his interest in the war poetry of
Wilfred Owen, his own staunch pacifist beliefs,
the unshakable memory of visiting the concentration camp at Belsen with Yehudi Menuhin
in 1945 before playing a recital for the victims’
families, his shock at the death of Gandhi in
1948, and a long-held desire to write a significant
large-scale choral piece. Almost inevitably, this
great public work also became one of his most
private statements. Britten rarely referred to the
requiem in his letters during the many months
when he was hard at work on it, as if it were too
personal to mention.
In his copy of Owen’s book, Britten marked
nine poems he intended to set to music as part
of the requiem. Almost from the start, Britten
knew he wanted to weave Owen’s texts in with
those from the mass for the dead—the juxtaposition of the ancient Latin service with these more
recent reports from the battlefield underlining
the confrontation of public and private, and of
past with present, giving the War Requiem its
unsettling power. Before he sketched any of the
music, Britten wrote out his libretto in an old
school exercise book, with the mass text on the
left page and the Owen poems facing on the
right, arrows carefully showing just how they
were to dovetail.
He set to work, declining three new commissions and postponing work on Curlew River
so that he could concentrate on the Coventry
mass. In the two decades since Britten’s “other”
requiem, the purely instrumental Sinfonia da
Requiem, events had moved from bloody combat
to the sobering reality of devastated cities, heartbroken families, and mass graves. And 1961,
the year Britten devoted to the War Requiem,
was marred by the building of the Berlin
Wall, an ominous escalation of U. S. action in
Vietnam, and the incident of the Bay of Pigs.
Owen’s poems, “full of the hate of destruction,”
and Britten’s new score, with its call for peace,
couldn’t have been more timely.
In February 1961, Britten wrote to Dietrich
Fischer-Dieskau, asking him to sing the baritone
solos. Britten’s partner, Peter Pears, had already
agreed to take the tenor part. Britten’s scheme
was carefully drawn: these two soloists, accompanied by a chamber orchestra, would sing the
Owen texts as “a kind of commentary on the
mass.” The Latin text itself would be given to
full chorus and orchestra, along with a soprano
solo and boys’ choir (performed by a children’s
choir at these performances). It’s a blueprint
shrewdly designed to point out the individual
amidst the crowd, to acknowledge personal grief
while preaching pacifism. That summer, when
Rostropovich and his wife, Galina Vishnevskaya,
came to the Aldeburgh Festival, Britten found
his soprano. Vishnevskaya gave a recital in
Aldeburgh only days after Rostropovich played
the premiere of the new cello sonata Britten had
written for him. The night Vishnevskaya sang,
Britten told her that he wanted to write the War
Requiem soprano solo for her. She was the final
link in his plan to bring together representatives of three nations devastated by the war: an
English tenor, a German baritone, and a Russian
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‘Cathedral’ and Reconciliation with
W. Germany . . . was too much for
them,” Britten said. “How can you, a
Soviet woman,” the minister of culture
asked Vishnevskaya, “stand next to
a German and an Englishman and
perform a political work?” Heather
Harper stepped in, learning the role
just ten days before the performance.
[Galina Vishnevskaya, who later
recorded the War Requiem with Pears,
Fischer-Dieskau, and Britten conducting the London Symphony Orchestra
and Chorus, died last December.]
Five days before the May 30
premiere, the critic William Mann
wrote in The Times that the War
Requiem was Britten’s masterpiece, a
verdict that, though premature, proved
accurate. The performance itself,
A rehearsal for the War Requiem in Coventry Cathedral in 1962. Peter
despite the patchy rehearsals and the
Pears stands far right. Seated to his right is Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.
new cathedral’s “lunatic” acoustics,
In the foreground, Meredith Davies stands on the podium and the
was stunning. Fischer-Dieskau was
composer is to his right.
moved to tears. “The first performance
created an atmosphere of such intensity,” he
soprano—a symbolic casting that is replicated in
wrote in his autobiography, “that by the end I was
our Chicago Symphony performances this week.
completely undone; I did not know where to hide
During the summer, Christopher Isherwood
my face. Dead friends and past suffering arose
sent Britten a book containing a photograph
in my mind.” The newspapers printed a uniform
of Wilfred Owen. “I am delighted to have
chorus of praise—Stravinsky quipped that to
it,” Britten wrote. “I am so involved with him
criticize the work would be “as if one had failed
at the moment, and I wanted to see what he
to stand up for ‘God Save the Queen’ ”—but
looked like: I might have guessed, it’s just what
Peter Schaffer, later the playwright of Amadeus,
I expected, really.” That same summer, William
Plomer, a friend of Britten, tracked down Owen’s came closest to the mark when he wrote that the
work was so profound and moving that it “makes
brother Harold, but the composer decided not to
criticism impertinent.”
visit him, no doubt fearing that it might someDuring composition, Britten deviated very
how disturb the affinity he felt for the poetry
little from the scheme he had first written out
itself. By August, Britten told his publisher,
in his exercise book: the six parts of the Latin
Boosey & Hawkes, that he had completed “the
text interwoven with nine poems by Owen—one
first large chunk” of the War Requiem (the title
in each part, except for the Dies irae, which
he had finally settled on), but two months later
includes four. The intent, as in the great Passions
he said it “is always with me.” It was finished at
by Bach, is of text combined with commentary,
last in January, while Britten and Pears were in
although the effect—particularly in Britten’s
Greece. “I was completely absorbed in this piece,
assured mix of opera and oratorio—is closer to
as really never before,” he wrote to a friend.
In the spring, Britten heard from Rostropovich Verdi’s grand nineteenth-century requiem.
Britten divides his cast of characters into disand Vishnevskaya, who had received the score
tinct groups: two soldiers, sung by the tenor and
and were both “mad” about the work. But a few
baritone soloists and accompanied by a chamber
weeks later, Britten lost his soprano: the Soviet
orchestra; the celebrants of the mass, which
authorities refused to allow Vishnevskaya to
participate in the premiere—“the combination of include the soprano soloist, a full chorus, and
4
orchestra; and, from afar, a boys’ choir accompanied by organ. The scene shifts seamlessly
from one group to another—cutting back and
forth from the church to the battlefield. Only in
the last pages of the final Libera me do all the
performers come together.
Requiem aeternam. As the orchestra begins
a solemn processional, interspersed with the
chorus’s chanting, bells toll on F-sharp and C,
notes as distantly related as any, lending the
music a sense of unease from the start. From
afar, the children sing the “Te decet hymnus.”
Our sense of music from different spheres is
quickly emphasized by the first of the Owen
settings, “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” sung by
the tenor, accompanied by just a small circle of
instruments. From the first line by Owen, “What
passing-bells for these who die as cattle?”, it’s
clear that the role of these inserted poems is not
only to add a parallel modern-day text in the
language of the composer, but also to question,
to criticize, and to accuse.
Dies irae. The longest section of the piece
begins with snatches of military fanfares, evoking
war. The key, G minor, and the brass volleys at
“Tuba mirum” recall the Day of Judgment from
Verdi’s Requiem. The baritone sings Owen’s
“Bugles sang,” as fanfares still echo in the distance. The soprano, the last of the participants to
sing, enters with the imperious phrases of “Liber
scriptus.” The mood changes abruptly for Owen’s
bitter poem, “The Next War,” which brings tenor
and baritone together in a duet of chilling gaiety.
The rest of the Dies irae is a swift unfolding of
vivid scenes: the chorus’s solemn “Recordare”
(with its violent “Confutatis” conclusion); a
setting for baritone of Owen’s “Sonnet: On
Seeing a Piece of Our Heavy Artillery Brought
Into Action”; the chorus’s shouts of “Dies irae”
followed by the soprano’s anguished cries of
“Lacrimosa.” Britten then clears the air for the
tenor’s pleading “Move him into the sun”—
almost a dramatic reading rather than a musical
setting of Owen’s poem “Futility”—intercut with
the soprano’s fading phrases. The bells return at
the end with their uneasy F-sharp and C sonority.
Offertorium. The movement begins with the
children in prayer. Their music is quickly followed
by a big fugue for full chorus at “Quam olim
Abrahae” that moves imperceptibly into a setting
of Owen’s “The Parable of the Old Man and the
Young.” Here, for the first time, the mass and the
commentary share the same music, underlining
the connections between these texts. (In the
background, the children’s serene “Hostias” adds
another layer to this complex scene.) The fugue
returns, now hushed and furtive, transformed by
the shift of tone in Owen’s poem.
Sanctus. Britten begins with the soprano,
in full operatic mode and accompanied by
clanging bells and chimes, followed by a stunning crescendo of choral chanting, an explosive
“Hosanna,” and a gently rocking “Benedictus.”
The baritone closes the movement in a dramatic,
volatile rendering of Owen’s “The End.”
Angus Dei. A single span of music, alternating the tenor’s high, quiet intoning of Owen’s “At
a Calvary near the Ancre” (smoothly flowing,
even with five sixteenth notes to each measure)
and the chorus’s simple scales, up and down
B minor and C major. It ends with the tenor
singing in Latin for the only time: “Dona nobis
pacem” (Grant us peace).
Libera me. A funeral march introduces a
large chorus of desolation and despair. The
soprano enters (her dramatic stammering recalls
Verdi’s setting of “Tremens factus sum ego”)
and the music builds to a chilling outcry. Slowly,
Britten clears the scene for the stark realism of
Owen’s “Strange Meeting,” the poem he had
long loved—a harrowing encounter between two
enemy soldiers. With their last words, “Let us
sleep now,” Britten weaves together all the performers in a slowly enveloping web of music. For a
moment, he suggests a sense of universal understanding. But then the bells intone their anxious
harmony, and the voices of the two soldiers can
still be heard, before the chorus calls for peace. It’s
a strangely uncertain ending, and we are reminded
of the words by Owen that Britten chose not to
set, but to place instead as an epigraph to his score:
My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The poetry is in the pity . . .
All a poet can do today is warn . . . Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra.
For more on Britten, please see “On this island,” a personal reflection on the composer by Gerard McBurney,
which begins on page 4.
Supertitle system courtesy of DIGITAL TECH SERVICES,
LLC, Portsmouth, VA
5
War Requiem
REQUIEM AETERNAM
Chorus
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine:
et lux perpetua luceat eis.
Eternal rest grant to them, O Lord;
and let perpetual light shine upon them.
Children’s Chorus
Te decet hymnus Deus in Sion;
et tibi reddetur votum in Jerusalem:
exaudi orationem meam, ad te omnis caro veniet.
To you we owe our hymn of praise, O God, in
Sion; to you must vows be fulfilled in Jerusalem.
Hear my prayer; to you all flesh must come.
Tenor
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them from prayers or bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of silent minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
Chorus
Kyrie eleison.
Christe eleison.
Kyrie eleison.
Lord, have mercy on us.
Christ, have mercy on us.
Lord, have mercy on us.
DIES IRAE
Chorus
Dies irae, dies illa,
Solvet saeclum in favilla,
Teste David cum Sibylla.
Day of wrath, day of anger
when the world will dissolve in ashes,
as foretold by David and the Sibyl.
Quantus tremor est futurus,
Quando judex est venturus,
Cuncta stricte discussurus!
There will be great trembling
when the judge descends from heaven
to scrutinize all things.
6
Tuba mirum spargens sonum
Per sepulchra regionum
Coget omnes ante thronum.
The trumpet will send its wondrous sound
into the earth’s sepulchres
and gather all before the throne.
Mors stupebit et natura,
Cum resurget creatura
Judicanti responsura.
Death and nature will be astounded,
when all creation rises again
to answer to judgment.
Baritone
Bugles sang, saddening the evening air,
And bugles answered, sorrowful to hear.
Voices of boys were by the river-side.
Sleep mothered them; and left the twilight sad.
The shadow of the morrow weighed on men.
Voices of old despondency resigned,
Bowed by the shadow of the morrow, slept.
Soprano and Chorus
Liber scriptus proferetur,
In quo totum continetur,
Unde mundus judicetur.
A book will be brought forth,
in which all is written,
by which the world will be judged.
Judex ergo cum sedebit,
Quidquid latet, apparebit:
Nil inultum remanebit.
When the judge takes his place,
what is hidden will be revealed,
nothing will remain unavenged.
Quid sum miser tunc dicturus?
Quem patronum rogaturus?
Cum vix justus sit securus?
What shall a wretch like me say?
Who shall intercede for me,
when even the just ones need mercy?
Rex tremendae majestatis,
Qui salvandos salvas gratis,
Salva me, fons pietatis.
King of tremendous majesty,
who freely saves the worthy ones,
save me, source of mercy.
Tenor and Baritone
Out there, we’ve walked quite friendly up to Death;
Sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland,—
Pardoned his spilling mess-tins in our hand.
We’ve sniffed the green thick odour of his breath,—
Our eyes wept, but our courage didn’t writhe.
He’s spat at us with bullets and he’s coughed
Shrapnel. We chorussed when he sang aloft;
We whistled while he shaved us with his scythe.
Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
No soldier’s paid to kick against his powers.
We laughed, knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars; when each proud fighter brags
He wars on Death—for Life; not men—for flags.
(Please turn the page quietly.)
7
Chorus
Recordare, Jesu pie,
Quod sum causa tuae viae:
Ne me perdas illa die.
Remember, sweet Jesus,
that my salvation caused your suffering;
do not forsake me on that day.
Quaerens me, sedisti lassus:
Redemisti crucem passus:
Tantus labor non sit cassus.
Faint and weary you have sought me,
redeemed me, suffering on the cross;
may such great effort not be in vain.
Ingemisco, tamquam reus:
Culpa rubet vultus meus:
Supplicanti parce, Deus.
I groan as one who is guilty:
owning my shame with a red face;
suppliant before you, Lord.
Qui Mariam absolvisti,
Et latronem exaudisti,
Mihi quoque spem dedisti.
You, who absolved Mary,
and listened to the thief,
give me hope, too.
Inter oves locum praesta,
Et ab haedis me sequestra,
Statuens in parte dextra.
Give me a place with the sheep,
and separate me from the goats;
lead me to your right hand.
Confutatis maledictis,
Flammis acribus addictis,
Voca me cum benedictis.
When the accused are confounded
and doomed to flames of woe,
call me among the blessed.
Oro supplex et acclinis,
Cor contritum quasi cinis:
Gere curam mei finis.
My prayers are unworthy,
but, good Lord, have mercy,
and rescue me from eternal fire.
Baritone
Be slowly lifted up, thou long black arm,
Great gun towering toward Heaven, about to curse;
Reach at that arrogance which needs thy harm,
And beat it down before its sins grow worse;
But when thy spell be cast complete and whole,
May God curse thee, and cut thee from our soul!
Chorus and Soprano
Dies irae, dies illa,
Solvet saeclum in favilla,
Teste David cum Sibylla.
Day of wrath, day of anger
when the world will dissolve in ashes,
as foretold by David and the Sibyl.
Quantus tremor est futurus,
Quando judex est venturus,
Cuncta stricte discussurus!
There will be great trembling
when the judge descends from heaven
to scrutinize all things.
Lacrimosa dies illa,
Qua resurget ex favilla,
Judicandus homo reus:
Huic ergo parce, Deus.
Full of tears and dread that day
when the dead arise
to be judged for their lives:
therefore, God, spare us.
8
Tenor
Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds,—
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved—still warm—too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?
Chorus
Lord, sweet Jesus,
grant them rest. Amen.
Pie Jesu Domine,
dona eis requiem. Amen.
OFFERTORIUM
Children’s Chorus
Domine Jesu Christe, Rex gloriae, libera animas
omnium fidelium defunctorum de poenis inferni,
et de profondo lacu: libera eas de ore leonis, ne
absorbeat eas tartarus, ne cadant in obscurum:
O Lord Jesus Christ, King of Glory, deliver the
souls of all the faithful departed from the pains
of hell and from the bottomless pit; deliver them
from the lion’s mouth, that hell swallow them not
up, that they fall not into darkness,
Chorus
Sed signifer sanctus Michael repraesentet eas in
lucem sanctam: quam olim Abrahae promisisti,
et semini ejus.
but let the holy standard-bearer Michael bring
them into that holy light which you promised of
old to Abraham and to his seed.
Baritone and Tenor
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
(Please turn the page quietly.)
9
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,—
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
Children’s Chorus
Hostias et preces tibi, Domine, laudis offerimus:
tu suscipe pro animabus illis, quarum hodie
memoriam facimus: fac eas, Domine, de morte
transire ad vitam.
We offer you, O Lord, sacrifices and prayers of
praise; receive them on behalf of those souls we
commemorate this day. Grant them, O Lord, to
pass from death to life.
SANCTUS
Chorus and Soprano
Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus,
Dominus Deus Sabaoth.
Pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria tua.
Hosanna in excelsis.
Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini.
Hosanna in excelsis.
Holy, holy, holy,
Lord God of Hosts.
Heaven and earth are full of your glory.
Hosanna in the highest.
Blessed is he who comes in the name of Lord.
Hosanna in the highest.
Baritone
After the blast of lightning from the East,
The flourish of loud clouds, the Chariot Throne;
After the drums of Time have rolled and ceased,
And by the bronze west long retreat is blown,
Shall life renew these bodies? Of a truth
All death will He annul, all tears assuage?—
Fill the void veins of Life again with youth,
And wash, with an immortal water, Age?
When I do ask white Age he saith not so:
“My head hangs weighed with snow.”
And when I hearken to the Earth, she saith:
“My fiery heart shrinks, aching. It is death.
Mine ancient scars shall not be glorified,
Nor my titanic tears, the sea, be dried.”
AGNUS DEI
Tenor
One ever hangs where shelled roads part.
In this war He too lost a limb,
But His disciples hide apart;
And now the Soldiers bear with Him.
10
Chorus
Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of
the world:
grant them rest.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,
dona eis requiem.
Tenor
Near Golgotha strolls many a priest,
And in their faces there is pride
That they were flesh-marked by the Beast
By whom the gentle Christ’s denied.
Chorus
Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of
the world:
grant them rest.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,
dona eis requiem.
Tenor
The scribes on all the people shove
And bawl allegiance to the state,
But they who love the greater love
Lay down their life; they do not hate.
Chorus
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,
Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of
the world:
grant them eternal rest.
dona eis requiem sempiternam.
Tenor
Grant us peace.
Dona nobis pacem.
LIBERA ME
Chorus and Soprano
Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna,
in die illa tremenda:
Quando coeli movendi sunt et terra:
Dum veneris judicare saeculum per ignem.
Tremens factus sum ego, et timeo,
dum discussio venerit, atque ventura ira.
Quando coeli movendi sunt et terra.
Dies illa, dies irae,
calamitatis et miseriae,
dies magna et amara valde.
Libera me, Domine . . .
Deliver me, O Lord, from everlasting death
on that day of terror:
When the heavens and the earth will be shaken.
As you come to judge the world by fire.
I am in fear and trembling at the judgment and
the wrath that is to come.
When the heavens and the earth will be shaken.
That day will be a day of wrath,
of misery, and of ruin:
a day of grandeur and great horror.
Deliver me, O Lord . . .
(Please turn the page quietly.)
11
Tenor
It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
“Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.”
Baritone
“None,” said the other, “save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled.
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress,
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Miss we the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even from wells we sunk too deep for war,
Even the sweetest wells that ever were.
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.”
Tenor and Baritone
“Let us sleep now . . .”
Children’s Chorus, Chorus, and Soprano
In paradisum deducant te angeli: in tuo adventu
suscipiant te martyres, et perducant te in
civitatem sanctam Jerusalem.
Chorus angelorum te suscipiat, et cum Lazaro
quondam paupere aeternam habeas requiem.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine; et lux
perpetua luceat eis.
Requiescant in pace. Amen.
12
May the angels lead you into paradise: may the
martyrs receive you at your coming, and bring
you into the holy city Jerusalem.
May the choir of angels receive you, and with
Lazarus, once poor, may you have eternal rest.
Eternal rest give to them, O Lord:
and let perpetual light shine upon them.
May they rest in peace. Amen.
© 2013 Chicago Symphony Orchestra