Requiem for strings

Toru Takemitsu was born in Tokyo, Japan, on October 8, 1930, and died there on February 20, 1996. He wrote his Requiem for strings in 1957; Masashi Ueda led the Tokyo Philharmonic in the premiere on June 20, 1957. Seiji Ozawa led the first Boston Symphony Orchestra performance of the piece on July 22, 1967, at Tanglewood.

The score for the Requiem calls for a divided string orchestra, that is, two groups of first violins, two of second violins, two of violas, two of cellos, plus double basses.

Toru Takemitsu, the most successful 20th-century Japanese composer, was largely self-taught. Though he started composing as a teenager, the innovations that would define his art would begin later, with a few watershed encounters that ensured his international acclaim. His supremely mystical music was distinguished by its stylistic depth and an idiosyncratic synthesis of the old and new, with a special sonic texture that became recognizable to audiences. 

Takemitsu was born in 1930 in Tokyo. Today it is hard to imagine the divide that existed between Eastern and Western cultures in Takemitsu’s early years; what is now called globalization was many decades away. Little was available for Japanese artists to experience remotely. Takemitsu’s flourishing was enabled by his inquiries into Western composers, due to opportunities that gradually emerged after World War II. Conscripted at just 14, Takemitsu was exposed to Western concert music and jazz by the US Armed Forces radio network while he was hospitalized after the war, recovering from tuberculosis. Takemitsu’s musical growth was remarkable, however, because he was not simply Westernized; meeting the totemic musical figures whom he came to love — Messiaen, Cage, Stockhausen, and Bernstein, to name just a few — affirmed his sense of identity as a Japanese musician. 

As with many artists, Takemitsu’s career began in hard dialectical opposition to prevailing trends. Takemitsu was a founder in the early 1950s of the Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop), a collective of avant-garde artists in different media who rejected the academic discipline of their Japanese training. For Takemitsu, traditional Japanese music on non-Western instruments was associated, unpleasantly, with his war years; he was at first determined to write music that had no trace of that lineage. Eventually he became one of its most brilliant scholars and exponents, even using Japanese instruments in his own works to vivid effect. 

Takemitsu had a few meaningful periods of brief study with teachers, none more so than his time with Fumio Hayasaka, the film composer who worked with director Akira Kurosawa on his early classics Rashomon, Ikiru, and Seven Samurai. Takemitsu, who would eventually work with Kurosawa himself (and write more than 90 film scores overall), must have inherited from Hayasaka a sure dramatic sense and an embrace of imagery suggested by sound. Hayasaka died in 1955 at age 41. Though Takemitsu said he originally had no dedicatee for his Requiem, Hayasaka’s presence loomed larger as the composition grew. Takemitsu was also very ill during the piece’s composition, and later claimed that he wrote the work as if it might also be his own eulogy.

The Requiem was Takemitsu’s first major piece for a large ensemble. Though short, it was also the breakthrough work that introduced him to the West. Igor Stravinsky, on a visit to Japan in 1959, heard the piece when his hosts tried to play recordings of more traditional music, mistakenly playing the Requiem instead. Stravinsky declared it a masterpiece, noting its “sincerity” and “passionate writing.” After a lunchtime meeting of the two composers, Takemitsu was recommended for the first of his two Koussevitzky Foundation commissions. (This would lead to another work for string orchestra, The Dorian Horizon.)

Takemitsu composed his Requiem before he embraced Japanese traditional music, and the piece rather has much in common with the austerity of the Second Viennese School. But his concept of the string orchestra’s sound is unique, and the work’s fluid form evokes a characteristically Japanese philosophy of spiritual transience. Only eight minutes, the piece is dense with ideas, viscerally surprising turns, and rich harmony. 

The strings are divisi, with violin I, violin II, violas, and cellos each in two sections. The ensemble recalls other composers that wrote pensive string orchestra music — Mahler in the Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony, for instance, and Vaughan Williams in  Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. Takemitsu was certainly capable of Mahlerian intensity; his score for Kurosawa’s Ran used Mahler as a model. And elegiac English string music is not too distant from the Requiem, though Takemitsu is undoubtedly less sentimental. Takemitsu’s treatment of the strings is thickly homophonic, the nine parts playing as one body, illustrating what he referred to as a “river of sound” in his music.

One can hear the piece in three main sections (Lent — Modéré — Lent), using two main motives, with cinematic repetition, that are often altered chromatically. But within each part of the piece, interpolated phrases stand in relief, recalling Edgard Varèse’s block-like assembly of musical moments. (Takemitsu greatly admired Varèse’s formal and textural innovations.) A listener’s sense of the work’s A-B-A trajectory is therefore thwarted, as in the blossoming forms of Debussy’s later works, or the logical, yet discursive narrative of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht.

The range explored by the instruments is large. The piece begins with the strings muted, the violas playing the first sinuous melody higher than the violins before being absorbed into the full weight of the sound. The second, more lurching motive is introduced by the violins. Then the first theme is heard once more, soaring high, over ponticello arpeggiated figures in the lower voices, and ending with a downward slide like a sigh. A viola solo transitions to a sustained iteration of the first motive, unmuted this time, over a slow-pulsing, syncopated accompaniment. The harmony feels like familiar minor chords, tinged by dissonance, that are burdened yet without gravitational focus.

The faster section is marked by several statements of a rhythmically active, sequenced motive punctuated by tutti pizzicato chords. The phrase culminates each time with a melodic outburst that explicitly states an earlier theme or alludes to it. The second violins and violas undercut some of these surges with an icy unison chord in harmonics. As before, a single viola concludes the section. 

The return of the beginning material feels affected by the tumult that precedes it, with the first theme culminating in a crisis, a piercing high harmony. Familiar shapes from the piece’s opening settle into a final violin soliloquy, over pianissimo strings in a slow progression that rests on a chord resembling E-flat minor in an unstable voicing. It is a chilly finish. 

Seiji Ozawa, one of Takemitsu’s greatest champions in the orchestral world, performed the composer’s works from the 1960s until after Takemitsu’s death from cancer in 1996. The Requiem was the first Takemitsu piece among many that Ozawa conducted with the BSO; he later recorded the piece with the Saito Kinen Orchestra in a profoundly felt performance.

Even as he embraced elements of Japanese traditional music and vastly expanded his scope as a composer, Takemitsu remained convinced of the Requiem’s expressive power. For Shôhei Imamura's 1989 film Black Rain, the composer used an expanded and modified version of his early score to depict the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. It was clear to Takemitsu that the Requiem’s sorrow could also resonate back through history.

Jacob Greenberg

Pianist and keyboardist Jacob Greenberg, a member of the BSO’s Tanglewood Music Center faculty, released the complete Debussy Preludes on New Focus Recordings, a disc that also includes music of the Second Viennese School. His podcast, Intégrales, explores meaningful intersections of music and daily city life. He lives in Berlin. www.jacobgreenberg.net