Devyataikina N.I., Lyashova S.A. —
“Partisan requiem” by H. Sommerro: the peculiarities of interaction between liturgical and author’s verses in the context of the musical drama
// PHILHARMONICA. International Music Journal. – 2020. – ¹ 6.
– P. 45 - 60.
DOI: 10.7256/2453-613X.2020.6.33160
URL: https://en.e-notabene.ru/phil/article_33160.html
Read the article
Abstract: The research object is the sacred music of a well-known Norwegian composer Henning Sommerro (born 1952), one of the bright components of his multifaceted creative work. The present article is the first work within the Russian scientific literature analyzing this aspect through the prism of one of the key works of the composer. The authors are also the first to introduce the complete musical score of the composition into the scientific discourse. Along with the recordings, it helps to understand how the composer manages to successfully combine the liturgical and secular components, the poetical and musical texts, and how they outline the modern musical directions. The research subject is the musical drama and expressive means of the “Partisan Requiem” (2000) by Sommerro performed by the combined Russian-Norwegian choir (Murmansk, 2019). The research shows that the composer keeps the graphic structure of the historically formed model of the genre. Owing to the musical expressive means and “citation”, demonstrating the postmodernist practices of the composer, the genre becomes recognizable, denoting the important “memory spaces”. At the same time, in terms of drama, Latin and Norwegian texts are “arranged” according to the internal connection, the monologue inclusions of the narrator are often accompanied with a reduced orchestra, whose timbre and color, on the one hand, thematically unite the Norwegian texts with the graphic and musical sphere of the composition, and on the other hand, deepen the understanding of the ideas underlying them. The briefness of poetic verses strengthens the importance of each of them; they are rhythmically linked to liturgical texts thus helping to create a single lexical and musical fabric of the composition by means of a complex interaction of the choir, the orchestra, the soloists and the actor-narrator.