Most of us, when contemplating medieval representations of danse macabre, in which Death leads people of all walks of life, do not pay attention to the sound aspect of the allegory. Yet it is very important – where there is dancing, there must also be music.
In the oldest depictions, dating back to the end of the Middle Ages, it is Death that plays an instrument. Interestingly, it is a wind instrument, such as a flute or bagpipes, or a percussion instrument. In the Middle Ages, such instruments were associated with the devil (the violin is a quite modern attribute in this context). Knowledge of this association has allowed art historians to understand the genealogy of the popular motif. The similarity of the contemporary images of death and the devil (whose domain included such bodily activities as dancing) explains the didactic function of the famous allegory, which appeared in Europe after the plague epidemic in the 14th century.
In the context of numerous painted representations and literary texts of this period, the collection of old musical records referring to the dance of death is relatively modest. Nineteenth-century works such as Totentanz by Ferenc Liszt and Danse macabre by Camille Saint-Saëns have little in common with the classical shape of allegory. Only the times of modernism and the development of historical art sciences meant that composers, exploring old techniques, directly referred to preserved medieval representations. The composers’ imagination was most influenced by paintings from Basel and Lübeck. The Swiss Totentanz inspired Arthur Honegger (La danse des morts) and Frank Martin (Ein Totentanz zu Basel im Jahre 1943), while Hugo Distler paid tribute to the north German one in his work Totentanz, Op. 12 No. 2. (...)
In the well-known motet Warum ist das Licht gegeben dem Mühseligen, Op. 74 No. 1 by Johannes Brahms from 1877, the issue of the continuity of German culture plays an important role. The composer used the music of his unfinished youth project Missa canonica (in which he explored Renaissance contrapuntal techniques) to pose fundamental existential questions. Brahms left some clues on how to interpret this compelling piece. He pointed out, among other things, that it was related to his melancholic disposition. Taking up the genre of a religious motet is interesting because the composer, baptised in the Protestant church, often ironised about religion, and his worldview can best be described as humanistic. (...)
O Tod, wie bitter bist du from Geistliche Gesänge, Op. 110 is Reger’s voice in final matters. The composition is believed to have been created in just five hours in 1912 and was dedicated to the recently deceased youngest daughter of another Leipzig master, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. The text of the motet comes from the Ecclesiasticus, and its spirit teaches the same difficult moral as the dance of death and asks the same questions as Brahms’ Job. Reger, though, highlights the contrast between a human who prospers and a human facing death in a different way. In one of his letters he wrote about this work: ‘it will be a terribly sad work, ending with a transformation – that is: Death is the end that transforms.’ (...)
There is one more piece on this album – Sarabande from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita in A minor for solo flute, BWV 1013. It will sound like the lament of Death itself on the ruins of the Lübeck church. For 19th-century German culture, Bach was both the ideal of a romantic artist and at the same time a religious craftsman. The culture founded on similar contradictions gave birth to masterpieces of musical literature, but also to the criminal ideology of Nazism. Each of the above-mentioned composers wanted to equal Bach, and it was Bach who was perceived as a proof of the German people’s superiority. Yet, like them, he was just another human in Death’s procession. 

Szymon Atys
Translated by Anna Marks

ACD335 - Track16 - Bach - Sarabande

ACD335 - Track03 - Distler - Totentanz

ACD335 - Track01 - Brahms - Warum

The great progress of civilisation in the first half of the 19th century undoubtedly had a colossal impact on the mentality of the society of that time. The enormous possibilities opened up by the invention of steam engines allowed people to look into the future of human development with great optimism. It can be assumed that for the people of that era, the present and the future were more important than looking back. But at the same time, the development of archaeology, extensive research into the origin of species and humans, and the emerging interest in the art of ancient times also resulted in a fascination with the works of composers from bygone eras. At this point we come to the essence of our considerations. How would a musician living in the first half of the 19th century interpret a piece written a hundred or so years earlier? Would they try to achieve a rendition as close as possible to the original, or would they rather construct a ‘Neo-baroque edifice’, referring to the architectural practice of that time?
	The best solution at this point would be to get into a time machine, go to Leipzig in the mid-19th century and make friends with Ferdinand David. Since we do not yet have such an option, one of the substitutes for a vehicle that we can use is David’s violin transcription of the Six Cello Suites by Johann Sebastian Bach.

Zbigniew Pilch
Translated by Anna Marks

ACD 337 - CD2 Track 01 - Bach - David - Cello Suite No  1  - Prelude

ACD 337 - CD1 Track 04 - Bach - David - Cello Suite No  3  - Sarabande

Work on preparing this album began in 2019, when I first encountered Mykola Dyletsky’s music – we performed fragments of his Requiem Liturgy with Wrocław Baroque Ensemble in Kyiv. At that time, they made a great impression on me, which, along with my subsequent work as a conductor on this artist’s works and subsequent concerts, strengthened my feeling that I was dealing with a unique repertoire. Dyletsky’s work is a fascinating encounter between the East and the West – the language, liturgy and melody of the Eastern Church harmonise with Western compositional techniques and musical styles. There are clear inspirations from the Venetian polychoral style and stile concertato, and tutti sections are often intertwined with figurative fragments in a solo ensemble. You can also see elements of musical rhetoric (...)
Both liturgical pieces presented on the album were written for two fourpart vocal ensembles. In my opinion, the way they are performed should be similar to the way we perform religious polychoral music of that period,
created for the Catholic Church in the Western Latin rite. I have a strong impression that if the a cappella texture present in these works were supplemented with instruments typical of European music from the first half
of the seventeenth century (e.g. cornets and trombones), i.e. instruments used, among others, by Claudio Monteverdi or Bartłomiej Pękiel and Mikołaj Zieleński, then it would transpire how close Dyletsky’s music was
to what was happening in Western Europe at that time. (...)
This project was an opportunity for me to come into contact with music that was created in the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but at the same time lies at the source of Ukrainian polyphonic music.
A great discovery was the fact that one of the ways through which polyphony entered the field of Orthodox Church music was Dyletsky’s work – his relations with Polish artists and his knowledge of the Italian style.
Interestingly, this process was one of the reasons why Orthodox music did not return to full monody, such as in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Therefore, we have evidence that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
in Dyletsky’s times was a space of unrestricted exchange of artistic ideas and their mutual interpenetration, and that the foundations of European integration in the field of culture were laid there.
I would like to thank the artists and all the people who participated in the preparation of this album. In addition, I would like to express my special gratitude for all help and substantive support to Dr Irina Gerasimova (Bazylowa), Prof. Aleksander Naumow, Dr Łukasz Hajduczenia, as well as Ludmila Kapustina and Volodymyr Andrushchak.

Andrzej Kosendiak (tranls. Anna Marks)

ACD 337 - CD2 Track 01 - Bach - David - Cello Suite No 1 - Prelude

CDAccord

Related tracks