jwilzewske: ‘Terefah’ According to John Harbison: Chamber-like Intimacy in a Symphonic Setting

T he finale, ‘Be ahead of all parting,’ is similarly a self-contained song, but now a duet, intertwining the voices as Orpheus and Eurydice are inextricable in our consciousness. The voice, though, is the poet’s—one of Rilke’s sonnets of ecstatic meditation on the myth, insisting upon an embrace of life that reconciles the necessity of death.”
— Robert Kirzinger, BSO program notes.

B e in front of every Farewell as if
it was already past, like the winter just passing now.
Because among winters comes one so finally Winter
that only by out-wintering it can your heart endure.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. Stephen Mitchell.

T e·re·fah (tə-reyʹ-fə): [Hebrew] (n.)
(1) a person or animal mauled by wild beasts, mortally injured; incurable, but not [yet] dead; in a state of shock, not yet comprehending that she/he/it is dead, or that the wounds are in fact mortal ones;
(2) a flickering flame; an imperiled life; one whose purchase on life is so tenuous and whose body functions are so erratic and compromised that the slightest change might probably extinguish the flame;
(3) one still deserving the respect of full personhood, but whose incurability absolves those attending to the needs of the person from blame for failing to undertake heroic measures that are certain to be futile.”
— Talmud.

John Harbison’s new symphony (No. 5) was premiered last night in Boston at the BSO. The symphony is unusual for its incorporation of singing parts——beautifully delivered by Nathan Gunn (baritone) and Kate Lindsey (mezzo). The work is also unusual for inclusion of an electric guitar.

As Robert Kirzinger (the author of the BSO program notes) observes, ‘The prosody of the vocal line is almost conversational.’ More, I think, than ‘almost’, it is conversational. And the intimacy of the Milosz-, Glück-, and Rilke poems-derived libretto clearly places this ‘symphony’ in a ‘chamber music’ realm. The text makes us wish that it were being presented in a smaller, chamber-like setting.

Nominally this symphony is about the mythical Orpheus and Eurydice—Orpheus’s recovery of his lover from Hades, and his loss of her again, due to his failure to comply with the directive to not look back.

But this is not merely a meditation on loss—the fact of its having already materialized. This symphony is a meditation on the moments preceding dying, on the dying itself, and on the moments just after—on the tenuous state that is referred to in Jewish Halachic law as ‘terefah’.

Harbison’s setting in the first two movements is of Czeslaw Milosz’s 2003 version of Orpheus, this version itself an elegiac response to Milosz’s loss of his wife to cancer two years before his own dying. The third movement sets the text of Louise Glück’s ‘Relic’, and the fourth movement is the adaptation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’ to which Robert Kirzinger refers in the blockquote above.

Harbison’s poetic stance is original, as one well familiar first-hand with the dying process, probably from direct experience with family or friends. The moments immediately before, during, and after dying are cataclysmic, and this symphony achieves a credible, highly personal rendering of these cataclysms.

The intrusion of the electric guitar provides a sense of the surreal quality of the experience—the experience, in their own faltering words, of the one who is dying; the experience of the surviving loved ones, our own words, also faltering. The electric guitar isn’t the half of it. Other of Harbison’s compositional choices are similarly unhinging and emotionally evocative.

This symphony is admirable just as it is; just as we heard it in its premiere performance last evening. And no doubt it may take me several hearings to fully appreciate some of size and force of the instrumental parts; I am sure it will ‘grow on me’ over time. I would say, though, that there was, for me, an incongruity between the dynamics of the massive sectional writing and the intimacy of the vocal line, the intimacy of the poems being sung. I wished throughout last night’s performance that, instead of a full orchestra, Harbison had written this for, say, an octet or other small ensemble. Possibly in the future there could be a transcription of Symphony No. 5 for a chamber ensemble. Maybe I am alone in this wish.

Musically, we have in this Symphony the mutation of personhood, of ‘character in extremis’: at the end of life as our minds flicker and fail, we are not quite the persons we once were. Our responses are not quite such coherent embodiments of the character that has inhabited our body for so long. We are not so ‘self-possessed’ as our selfhood falters and our ability to grasp it or bring our ‘self’ forth dwindles.

Likewise, upon the loss of a significant other, our own identities flicker and seem in danger of being blown out like a candle. These are subjects not often addressed directly. More usually art and music characterize mortality as an event or status or relation, and not so much as a process.

If the loved one’s dying has occurred over days or weeks, we survivors have the accumulated fatigue and dislocation from ordinary daily routines that loosens us from our moorings. The end has been anticipated, planned for. The process is arduous. We become horribly tired. And yet, upon the actual event, the whole Earth shifts. There is a holy alertness that prevents our sleeping, even though we are very tired and want to sleep. Everything is surreal or hyper-real.

Eurydice’s awareness of and reaction to her own dying are ones of surprise. She is transfixed——impressed maybe by the quality of nothingness which is overtaking her, for which Orpheus ‘had composed no rhyme’.

Traditional accounts focus on Orpheus’s grief and calibration of Eurydice’s death——focus on the tragic loss itself. This Harbison symphony instead gives us fresh insight into the surprise that comes before the loss—Orpheus’s surprise and Eurydice’s shorter surprise. It reminded me of the existential beauty of volunteering in a hospice.

In the second half of the evening’s program, Ben Heppner (tenor) and Anne Sofie von Otter (mezzo) sang Mahler’s ‘Das Lied von der Erde’, with its mandolin and other unusual orchestration: a meditation on life and mortality that nicely complemented the Harbison work in both texture and content. Conductor James Levine allowed the orchestra’s dynamics to overpower Heppner in the first movement, but the balance was fine for the other movements.

Let’s sing then, of smoking water in your rose-colored daybreaks; of colors: cinnabar, carmine, burnt sienna, blue; of the delight of swimming in the sea under marble cliffs; of our mayfly-like impermanence and juicy days seized while we had the chance. Taking Harbison’s advice, let’s sing like there is no tomorrow.

jwilzewske

Saturday, April 19, 2008

‘Terefah’ According to John Harbison: Chamber-like Intimacy in a Symphonic Setting

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