The Cecilia Chorus of New York, April 26, 2025

CONDUCTOR’S NOTES

About tonight’s concert

On August 12, 2017, demonstrator Heather Heyer was murdered in the Charlottesville terrorist attack.

At the time, Virginia-based composer Adolphus Hailstork was completing his setting of the iconic poem “Testimonial” by former US Poet Laureate Rita Dove.

Hailstork decided to encode letters of Heyer’s name as musical notes, heard in a soft peal of chimes near the end of the work.

When The World Called was premiered, the musical tribute was not made public. Hailstork has authorized its disclosure in connection with this concert, whose music-making and message we dedicate in their entirety to the memory of a principled life, ended too soon. Heather Heyer would have turned 40 in 2025. We welcome honored guests Susan Bro, mother of Heather Heyer; and Rita Dove.

About The World Called by Adolphus Hailstork

I’m a longtime fan of Adolphus Hailstork. He’s an unapologetically neo-Romantic composer, inexhaustibly creative, equipped with a flawless technique. Steeped in the styles and tropes of his classical forbears, he’s particularly well-attuned to singing, solo as well as choral (which is its own thing). Hailstork’s writing is luxuriantly melodious, carried forward by vigorous rhythm and a purposeful yet sensuous harmony.

The World Called is a 22-minute setting for chorus, orchestra and solo soprano of a landmark text by former US Poet Laureate Rita Dove. As the cantata begins, strings and winds unfurl a rhapsodic melody against a pulsing backdrop of horns and brass. The chorus enters with a fanfare of parallel triads that projects the grandeur and urgency of the poetic summons. A reflective treatment of “and I answered” segues into a sassy episode for clarinet and woodblock.

As the cantata unfolds, its music toggles among these three registers, of grandiloquence, mischievousness, and contemplation. Hailstork follows the protagonist’s shifts of mood as she reckons with this transformative moment in her life. The soloist’s flourishes on “flourish”, in the midst of a rollicking waltz, are charmingly apt.

The tribute to Heather Heyer occurs near the work’s muted conclusion. Using the note B for the letter H (as J. S. Bach did) and then the vowels of Heyer’s name, Hailstork gives the chimes a sequence of pitches that quietly memorialize the fallen American: B, E, A, B, E. As the chimes are sounding, the chorus intones “the world called” and the soprano gently calls out:“promise”.

About A German Requiem by Johannes Brahms

The loss of Brahms’s mother in 1865 affected the composer deeply and likely turned his mind toward the writing of his German Requiem, which he worked on over a period of three years. (In other news from 1865: the 13 th amendment, abolishing slavery, passed narrowly; Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses Grant; Abraham Lincoln was assassinated; and on April 26 – exactly 160 years ago today – John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin, was captured and killed. Alice in Wonderland was published later that same year.)

Brahms devised his own libretto, eschewing references to a specific religion in favor of a fully ecumenical spirituality; he was quoted as having wished to title this work “A Human (“menschliches”) Requiem.”

The Requiem’s seven movements are a marvel of unity, craft, and inspiration, a repository of all that it’s possible to do with melody, harmony, counterpoint, rhythm, meter and orchestration (for voices as well as instruments). Limitations of space allow for just a few examples.

Movement One – whose nocturnal orchestration omits violins – introduces a pair of motives that will recur throughout the Requiem. I think of this complex as a single yin/yang entity, akin to the two faces of a coin, each equally significant and complementing the other. The first element, instantly memorable, is heard immediately, as, after just four beats of F, the cello drops to Eb (setting up a downward resolution to D); the descent can be read as a kind of sigh, or a lowering of the head or body. When the chorus enters, the motive’s complementary half, a rising major third from F to A (before resolving upward to Bb) is sung by the sopranos (“Selig sind”). A listener feels a lifting of the spirits, the upward turn of a downcast gaze. “They who sow in tears shall reap in joy.”

Movement Two is a bleak funeral march, with an ABAC structure. The opening three notes in the first violins are, miraculously, the retrograde (reverse order) of the rising soprano “Selig” motive from Movement One. The unison choral melody, punctuated by eerie strokes from the harp, is a minor-key, metrically altered version of the cello melody that opens Movement One. The B section (interlude) brightens to a major key, with the harp now depicting a welcome spattering of raindrops. Then the disconsolate march returns, climaxes, and fades away, to be followed by a glorious affirmation (“Aber des Herrn Wort”) of the immutability of divine truth. In the prevailing Bb major context, the insistent Ab’s (on “Zion” and elsewhere) echo the F-Eb (whole step) relationship from Movement One. Brahms’s polyrhythmic treatment of the Ab figure (a five-fold bass-voice statement of a three-beat figure in a 4/4 frame) anticipates by a century the high-voltage metric inventiveness of a Steve Reich.

Movement Three introduces the baritone solo, perhaps an avatar of Brahms himself. The orchestral coloring, with its sustained soft horn pedal, recalls the opening of Movement One. The double bass pizzicato recapitulates the “Selig” side of the omnipresent motivic coin, again in retrograde. The soloist’s plea to know his mortality, and from this reminder to achieve the wisdom to live reverentially, is achingly timely. The movement concludes with another fugue, this one a virtuoso double fugue, with chorus and orchestra developing independent (but related) material simultaneously. The choral subject opens with the “Selig” motif in its prime (original) form.

Movement Four offers a radiant vision of a resplendent afterlife in which light is reflected from every surface. The mirroring is rendered through a deftly wrought retrograde: the descending flute melody that opens the movement is immediately sung “in reverse” by the sopranos; once again, the soprano melody begins with the rising three-note “Selig” motif. The complementary whole-step figure is heard most saliently toward the end of the movement as the sopranos drop from Eb to Db: “wie lieblich”, how lovely.

Movement Five was a later addition to the Requiem. The only movement to feature the soprano soloist, it evokes Brahms’s tenderness toward his mother. Note the plaintive oboe countermelody as the soprano begins her solo: it begins with the “Selig” motif. Clarinet and flute follow suit: gentle upwellings of deep feeling.

Movement Six is another march, at once brisk and mysterious. Its suspenseful opening chords – in upper strings, then upper winds – telegraph a fragile instability, instantiating the text’s message of impermanence: “here (on earth) we have no enduring state.” The notion of transformation (“verwandelt”) is given musical expression through a technique of diminution, whereby the violins replay a previous countermelody at twice its original speed. Through Brahms’s prominent juxtaposition of two harmonies whose relationship is remote – C minor and E minor (“sondern”; “die Toten werden auferstehen”; “die Tot ist verschlungen”) – we are made to experience viscerally the opposition of mutually exclusive, “before” and “after” states. Listeners will by now be expecting the “Selig” motive to reappear, and Brahms does not disappoint. The opening notes of the fugue subject (“Herr, du bist”) are again the “Selig” motif, in retrograde. Further on, the composer – might Brahms be showing off a bit? – detonates fireworks, unspooling a chain (“zu nehmen Preis”) of retrograde inversions (backwards…and upside-down)!

Movement Seven revisits the Requiem’s opening bars, the earlier dark stillness now brilliantly lit and, through pulsating eighth notes, made teemingly alive. A favorite moment: after 126 measures, this material returns for a valedictory appearance. Now it is not merely the pitch that drops the whole step from F to Eb, but – in what feels like an earthquake – the key.

It is seismic: an apotheosis.