Thoughts on Memorial to Martin Luther King
by Oskar Morawetz
Reprinted from Toronto Symphony News, 1979/1980 Issue Six.

Although my composition Memorial to Martin Luther King for Solo Cello, Winds and Percussion has become, during the last few years, one of my most frequently performed compositions, it owes its origin to a series of accidental circumstances.

In 1966 my friend, Boris Berlin, brought to the attention of Rostropovich my Two Fantasies for Cello and Piano. When I met him in Toronto the following year, he praised highly this work and added later: "I want you to write a work for me which I would like to premiere when I come back next time to Canada. But don't write a concerto, neither a work with the usual form or content nor with the standard sized orchestra!" Of course I was very pleased with this unique opportunity and I could not help asking him: "But, Slava, could you tell me more clearly what kind of work you would like?" Rostropovich answered simply: "This I leave completely to your own imagination." When he came back to Canada later that same year he asked me immediately if I had finished the commissioned work. I had to confess, rather embarrassed, that I had started several sketches but none of them I found convincing enough to continue.

Only a year later, in April of 1968 when I watched on television (three days after the assassination of Martin Luther King) the slow, sad and very moving funeral procession in Atlanta, the idea suddenly struck me to write for Rostropovich a work dedicated to the memory of King. It happened, to be quite accurate, when I saw on the screen King's gravestone with the inscription of his favourite spiritual: "Free at last, thank God Almighty I am free at last!" The same day I saw clearly in front of me the form, content and orchestration of my composition. It would contain the last day of King's life - the Freedom March in Memphis, the fatal shot, his death. The composition would end with a funeral march based on King's favourite spiritual, over which the cello would express the sorrow and sadness not only of the black community but of the whole world. The complete exclusion of any string instruments in the orchestra would give the work a specially dignified and dramatic colour and at the same time solve Rostropovich's wish for an unusual orchestration. The only difficulty of starting my work was that I could not find anybody in Toronto who knew the melody of the mentioned spiritual. Finally, I phoned the famous black singer, Dorothy Maynor in New York whom I had known well since 1949 when she was introducing in the U.S.A., Canada and Australia several of my vocal compositions. She sang the spiritual for me on the phone.

I finished my composition three months later and mailed it to Rostropovich. The world premiere with him as soloist was programmed for February 1970 with the Edmonton and Vancouver Symphony Orchestras. But, due to illness, his North American tour had to be cancelled and the premiere took place at a later date with Zara Nelsova and the Montreal Symphony. She also recorded it on disc for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

On January 15th, 1979, which would have been King's 50th birthday, this recording was broadcast on radio stations in over 30 countries; it meant a great deal to me to read reports from countries as distant as Korea, China, Argentina, Brazil, Australia and especially the Vatican which included this work in a number of broadcasts throughout Europe. The composition is now in the repertoire of seven well-known cellists including Tsuyoshi Tsutsumi who will play it with the Toronto Symphony on March 25, 26 and 28. When he played it in 1978 at the Banff Music Festival, musicologist and music critic Eugene Cramer reviewed it with the following words: "The Memorial to Martin Luther King is a very effective and moving piece, one of the best contemporary works I have heard, and it should rank with the Berg Violin Concerto as one of the monuments of the 20th century music of its kind." The most recent performance took place last month in Prague (February 14 and 15) with the well-known Czech cellist Josef Chuchro and the Czech Philharmonic conducted by the outstanding Polish conductor, Henryk Czyz.

I cherish particularly a wonderful letter I received from Mrs. King wherein she thanked me for my composition, and in which she enclosed a signed family picture - the last one taken before her husband's death.

It was a great surprise for me when I noticed only several years after finishing this composition that King had used the opening lines of the spiritual contained in my work, in the final section of his now world-famous speech in Washington in 1963, mostly known under the quote "I have a dream":

"When we allow freedom to ring - when we let it ring from every city and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men, white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last, free at last, Great God almighty, we are free at last'."