Valentin Silvestrov: Requiem for Larissa

“There is a tradition in Russian culture,” Gramophone noted recently, “of the auto-didactic artistic genius whose work transcends the culture of his time – Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Platonov being prime examples in literature, Mussorgsky in music. And this transcendental model is what Silvestrov’s contemporaries draw on when they describe his work.” The late Alfred Schnittke referred to Valentin Silvestrov (born Kiev, 1937) as “the greatest composer of our generation”, Arvo Pärt expressed similar sentiments in a recent New Yorker interview, and both in the Ukraine and across the former Soviet Bloc there can be few composers today who are held in comparable esteem by their peers. In the West, his reputation continues to spread.

Nonetheless, Silvestrov himself felt when writing his “Requiem for Larissa”, between 1997 and 1999 that it would be his last composition (in fact, four years would pass before he would begin another major work, the Seventh Symphony of 2003). The sudden death of his wife, musicologist and literary scholar Larissa Bondarenko, in a Kiev hospital in May 1996, had stunned the composer. Not only a champion of his music, Bondarenko had been an integral part of its evolution for more than 30 years, and the “Requiem” reflects on the life she and Silvestrov shared, the things they achieved together.

“Time in Valentin Silvestrov’s music is a black lake,” writes Paul Griffiths, in the liner notes to “Requiem for Larissa”. “The water barely moves; the past refuses to slide away; and the slow, irregular stirrings of an oar remain in place. Nothing is lost here. A melody, which will rarely extend through more than five or six notes, will have each of those notes sounding on, sustained by other voices or instruments, creating a lasting aura. Elements of style, hovering free of their original contexts, can reappear from Webern, from Bruckner, from Mozart, from folksong. But yet everything is lost. Every melody, in immediately becoming echo, sounds like the reverberation of something that has already gone. Every feature of style speaks of things long over. Silvestrov’s creative destiny for many years has been the postlude: his works revive past music especially Romantic symphonic music in the very act of lamenting its disappearance.”

Or, as Silvestrov once famously put it, “I do not write new music. My music is a response to and an echo of what already exists.” His poetic, “metaphorical” style of composing has alluded to the entire history of music (and other arts), viewing the past through the cracks in modernism, as one writer remarked.

Silvestrov's Requiem draws on the longstanding tradition of the Latin Mass for the Dead, but it uses the text almost entirely in fragmented or even shattered form. “During the two centuries and more since Mozart,” notes Griffiths, “the text has outgrown its original liturgical function to become an adaptable frame for human responses to death, responses of grief, anger, fear and hope in varying measures, ranging in tone from the grandly public to the intimately private, and differing too in presumed location, whether church or concert hall. Composers have edited the text accordingly. Silvestrov’s choice, though, is different: his is a Requiem in which words are not so much trimmed away as forgotten. Phrases are begun, then left adrift, as if the singers could not remember how to continue. Perhaps they are trying to avoid what must come next, undo the occasion in which they are participating. Perhaps they are too shocked to speak.”

“It is as if Silvestrov’s mind were constantly withdrawing into an interior space in order to find room for remembered images sheltered by music and uttered with its breath”, writes Tatjana Rexroth.

For all the tragic circumstances of its genesis, the “Requiem” contains some of Silvestrov’s most compelling and intimate music, “extraordinarily beautiful lissom music” as Gramophone called it last year.