Canada lost one of its premier composers on June 13 when Oskar
Morawetz passed away at the age of 90 at a retirement residence in
Toronto.
Morawetz was born in Czechoslovakia. As a youth, he studied piano and
theory at the Prague Conservatoire. His first musical love, however, was
opera. When his parents gave him a score to Wagner's Tannhauser for his
13th birthday, he was off to the races. He began studying score after
score, sight-reading them at the piano, taking them to school to read
under his desk when the teacher wasn't looking, memorizing them as he
went.
At 19, conductor George Szell recommended him as assistant conductor
at the Prague Opera. Though parental pressure forced him to study forest
management, Morawetz managed to make his way to Paris and Vienna in 1938
to study piano.
He eventually fled Europe in 1940, and made his way to Canada.
He earned a doctorate in music from the University of Toronto in
1953, and taught composition at its Faculty of Music before retiring in
1982. Morawetz, your stereotypical absent-minded professor, would
astound with his encyclopedic knowledge of scores. He told his students
that his goal as a youth was to memorize every note in the symphonies of
Beethoven, Mozart, and other classical masters.
He won prizes for his first two compositions, but his third, Carnival
Overture, written in 1945, put him on the map. It has become one of his
most frequently performed works. The Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra
played it to open its season Sept. 15.
In 1971, Morawetz's From the Diary of Anne Frank received an award
from the J. I. Segal Fund for Jewish Culture in Canada for "the most
important contribution to Jewish culture and music in Canada." In 1987,
then Lieutenant Governor Lincoln Alexander awarded him the Order of
Ontario, the first composer to receive such a distinction, for his
"outstanding contribution to the world of music (which) has brought him
international recognition and renown."
Two years later, he was named a member of the Order of Canada. In
addition to two awards from SOCAN, Morawetz scooped up two Junos for
Best Classical Composition. One of those came in 1989, for his Concerto
for Harp and Chamber Orchestra which he had composed in 1976 for Erica
Goodman.
It was Goodman who premiered the work with the HPO under Boris Brott
at the Guelph Spring Festival on May 31 that same year. Next Saturday
night, Goodman will perform the Harp Concerto with the HPO in Hamilton
Place.
Goodman, who knew Morawetz since her childhood, said that the
concerto is "very typical of Oskar's music in that it has enormous
strength and intensity."
It contains several novel effects for the harp. In the opening
movement, the soloist imitates a snare drum by trilling the fingers on
the harp's soundboard. In the second movement, Goodman will strike
bell-like sounds with a glass swizzle stick.
"I might just use a chopstick. I'm not sure," joked Goodman. "He
wants a kind of a thin, glassy sound." The soloist also has to tap the
metal wire strings at the bottom of the harp to imitate a tam-tam. "I
think the thing that sets his music apart isn't so much the effect,"
said Goodman, "it's the power of it, and the extreme intensity of it. He
was concerned about every note, and about the dynamics, the angularity
of it. It's a worthy piece, and quite effective in its own way."
[...]
Goodman will play her Lyon-Healy harp. "It has a nice big sound,"
said Goodman of the instrument that has its column and base trimmed in
gold leaf. "Yeah, it's real gold. Not that that has anything to do with
the sound."
[...]
