Opus "Musica dolorosa", 1983, for String Orchestra by Composer Pēteris Vasks (1946)

“Musica dolorosa” was composed shortly after “Message” (Vēstījums), the piece whose title is key to the intonation of all other works by Pēteris Vasks and shortly before the Piano trio “Episodi e canto perpetuo”, which contains their dramatic model. Owing to these works and Gidon Kremer’s role in championing them in the 1990s, Vasks joined the international constellation of contemporary composers, with the Estonian Arvo Pärt (1935), Pole Henryk Górecki (1933−2010), and Georgian Giya Kancheli (1935−2019) as some of its brightest stars.

Trained as a contrabassist at Emīls Dārziņš Music School, he was prevented from studying composition because of the repressive Soviet policies against Baptists (Vasks was born and raised in a Baptist family), but managed to study in Vilnius. In 1970, he gratuated from the Lithuanian State Conservatory in Vytautas Sereika’s contrabass class, but later, in 1978, the Latvian State Conservatory in Valentīns Utkins’ composition class.

Looking back at his composition “Musica dolorosa”, Vasks has said: “I am a part of my nation, for which it was a dark and tragic time when it seemed that even the greatest idealists and optimists were beginning to lose hope for our survival: will we be able to endure all this? It all hurt and I wanted those who hear [the composition] to hurt as well. [I wanted] for such an openly painful canto to address you, purify you and show the existence and possibility of another dimension. And that is the mission of music, after all”.

The fate of this music of suffering and pain has been very happy, for it has been frequently recorded and even more played all over the world. The first to perform “Musica dolorosa” were musicians of the Latvian Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra under the conductor Tovy Lifshitz (1928−2015).

At that time the compositions, in which Vasks’ concentrated musical vocabulary is unmistakeable, “Summer Cantos” (Vasaras dziedājumi) and “Lauda” or Symphony No. 1 “Voices” (Balsis), did not yet exist, but “Musica dolorosa” played a crucial role in their development. There are three lines that cross in this composition: the constant, imperishable, eternal foundation (the pedal-point, ostinato, little-changing tonal support), the lamenting intonations rooted in the traditions in the genre (the descending glissando), and the reaching upward, which is so characteristic of Vasks’ music – toward heaven, toward freedom and confirmation of something already known. The interaction of these three lines reaches its greatest dramatism in the middle part of the composition – the dynamic and harmonic tension here achieves an aleatoric culmination whose contrast, the cello monologue, can be perceived as another, quiet culmination. The recapitulation brings us back to the atmosphere of the beginning – a deep, quiet canto of pain. And although the ending provides no consolation – there is only an open, never healing wound – it is Vasks’ deeply felt conviction that everything in this world comes from love, even pain.

Marc Gaber