Composer inspired by King's Funeral
When Canadian composer Oskar Morawetz saw the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr. on television that fateful day back in 1968, it suddenly unlocked for him a
musical door that had remained stubbornly shut for 11 years.Morawetz had been
wrestling vainly with ideas for a new piece commissioned in 1957 by Mstislav
Rostropovich. It was to be a cello-and-orchestra work, but the Russian cellist
wanted "something different in content, different in orchestration, different in
form."
Watching the funeral procession on television, Morawetz saw the band of wind
and percussion players; his mind instantly flashed back to his native
Czechoslovakia where such music at funerals was common ("People say Mahler's
music is full of funeral marches; wel, he was born just 20 kilometers from my
birthplace. The town was full of Mahlers").
Then Morawetz saw King's tombstone on TV and heard the announcer comment on
the inscription: "Dr. King's favorite spiritual, 'Free at Last.'" Deeply moved
by the tragedy, Morawetz felt he had found the key to his cello piece. It would
end with a funeral march based on the tune of "Free at Last".
The resulting work, "Memorial to Martin Luther King," guest conductor Kurt
Masur leads tonight, Friday and Saturday with the Cleveland Orchestra in
Severance Hall with Stephen Geber as cello soloist. The work shares the program
with another work of farewell character, Mahler's elegiac ninth symphony.
But in 1968, though Morawetz felt he had found the key to his cello piece in
the King funeral, there was one minor problem: Morawetz did not know the
spiritual "Free at Last".
The composer had great difficulty tracking down the tune, he said in a
Severance Hall interview. He phoned a black library in Toronto but no one there
knew it. He tried several black churches with no results. Finally he found it in
an anthology - and almost gave up on the whole project then and there.
"It was almost a happy melody," he said. "I got it on a tape and it
sounded almost like a happy march."
The tune became a musical challenge for Morawetz. How he treats it is one
point of interest in his 20-minute piece.
Another such point is how Morawetz fulfilled Rostropovich's request for
"something different." He has excluded all stringed instruments from his
orchestra except the solo cello. And he has divided his 20-minute piece into
eight sections with programmatic significance. The pistol shot that ended King's
life is clearly suggested.
As a Czech-born Jew who escaped from Europe just before the Nazi madness
consumed his country, Morawetz feels great empathy for Martin Luther King. A lot
of Morawetz's friends died in Nazi camps and he is acutely aware of continuing
prejudice, even in Canada, against Jews and blacks. Canada, he says, took in
relatively few Jewish refugees from Hitler because the country's immigration
minister at the time was anti-Semitic; and he remembers his father telling him
how Marian Anderson was not allowed to eat in the main dining room of a posh
Toronto hotel the morning after a sold-out recital in that city. (The waiter
said, "some of our American clients might not come back").
"Memorial to Martin Luther King" has been widely performed, even in unlikely
places like Guatemala, Morawetz says. It has been recorded by Zara Nelsova.
Ironically Rostropovich, who commissioned it, was unable to give the premiere
because it feel during the time of his own political difficulties with the
Russian government. His American tour that year was abruptly canceled.
Another of Morawetz's major works that has been widely heard is a piece for
soprano and orchestra based on "The Diary of Anne Frank". The composer cherishes
the memory of a long correspondence with Anne's late father whom he met because
of that piece. He also met one of Martin Luther King's daughters who was taking
part in a concert at which his King piece was played in Canada.
This weekend his two most successful works have been combined to make
Morawetz into something of a nomad. He was here Tuesday for the first rehearsals
of the King piece at Severance, then dashed to Toronto where last night Andrew
Davis and the Toronto Symphony gave the first of three performances of the Anne
Frank piece. He is back in Cleveland for tonight and tomorrow night's Severance
performances (he's giving the pre-concert lecture tomorrow night), then goes
back to Toronto for the last Toronto Symphony performance Saturday. It will also
be his 70th birthday.
This weekend's performances of "Memorial to Martin Luther King" are not the
work's U.S. premiere, Morawetz says. That took place some time back at the
Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y.
