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Deaths and Transfigurations New York
Isaac Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall
01/15/2025 - & January 9, 11, 2025 (Philadelphia)
Jake Heggie: Songs for Murdered Sisters
Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 9 in D Major
Joshua Hopkins (Baritone)
Philadelphia Orchestra, Yannick Nézet-Séguin (Music director, Conductor)
J. Heggie & J. Hopkins with picture of Hopkins’ sister and her children (© Zoe Tarshis)
“I have known two women who were murdered, both by jealous former romantic partners, so the killing of Joshua’s sister resonated with me. But I could not promise anything: with songs and poems, they either arrive or they don’t. I then wrote the sequence in one session. I made the ‘sisters’ plural because they are indeed–unhappily–very plural. Sisters, daughters, mothers. So many.”
Jake Heggie
“It is a funny thing, but when I am making music, all the answers I seek for in life seem to be there, in the music. Or rather, I should say, when I am making music, there are no questions and no need for answers.”
Gustav Mahler
An explanation of the picture above. When a Canadian assassin murdered three ex‑partners in 2015, one of the victims was the sister of famed baritone Joshua Hopkins. Later, he and composer Jake Heggie, with Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, produced a work which depicted more than grief. Songs for Murdered Sisters was also a work of rage. It was written commemorating Canada’s “White Ribbon Campaign”, about gender‑violence and violence of all kinds.
(Newspapers inanely use the phrase “senseless violence”, as though there is also sensible violence.)
Mr. Heggie’s songs are usually sung by Mr. Hopkins himself, this augmenting the artistry with personal tragedy.
That was the first half of the Philadelphia Orchestra program last night in Carnegie Hall. A program with Gustav Mahler’s 9th Symphony, which together could have been titled “Deaths and Transfigurations.”
Mahler’s great symphony dealt with manifold things. Mr. Heggie’s work, in eight deceptively simple poems by Ms. Atwood, dealt with the emptiness of death. In Margaret Atwood’s words, “Who was my sister/Is now an empty chair/Is no longer/No longer there/She is now emptiness/She is now air.”
The words are stark, Mr. Heggie’s octet of songs produce mystery (baritone Hopkins rising out of the introductory flute duet), they produce rage, they produce utter sadness, and at times, with bells tolling, and the fearful wrath of Ms. Atwood’s words, of “So many sisters. Killed by fearful men/Who wanted to be taller.”
Mr. Hopkins used all the changes demanded by Mr. Heggie. Here were declamations, here were leaps down an octave. Nor did he stand still. He walked across the stage, turned his back to the audience, returned and used his resonant skill to produce a most revealing personal grief.
Supposedly, Mr. Heggie based these songs on that other song cycle of lamentation, Schubert’s Winterreise. Yet it also reflected–at least in theme–Mahler’s Songs for Dead Children and indeed some of Mussorgsky’s tragic lullabies. Yet Mr. Heggie is one of our great opera composers. Here his notes worked with the words, and with the so subjective requiem of the artists.
While the subjects are close, Mahler’s Ninth Symphony has only the bookend movements which musically spoke of death. In this case, the Philadelphia Orchestra, who had essayed Mr. Heggie’s delicate orchestration, was conducted by Yannick Nézet‑Séguin. And nowhere today could one find a more visceral conductor?
Thus the two center movements were unbridled macabre dances. The second movement more than a village dance. It was a dance by club‑footed lunatics. Forget the middle section: these were dances which were lunatic, grotesque.
The same with the third movement. And for this, my image turned to Edgar Allan Poe’s neglected but most macabre story, Hop‑Frog. Read it to discover more.
The opening is Mahler yearning, dying, being resurrected. Mr. Nézet‑Séguin allowed the Philadelphia artists to play hard on their instruments (one almost thought of Russian orchestras). Mr. Nézet‑Séguin was never inhibited, he never halted the emotional power. And while cohesion is never fully possible, we knew that was a work which needed no words.
For the finale, the conductor turned on all the expressiveness possible. The climax was brute force rather than passion. The coda, though was poignant: a brief single cello solo which was, in a word, heart‑rending, the whisper of death’s ultimate mystery.
Harry Rolnick
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