Transience and Duration

“We won’t be able to deal with Hans Castorp’s story quickly. Not even seven days a week, not even seven months, will suffice. It’s best not to predetermine how long it will hold us in its bonds on earth. Surely, for God’s sake, it won’t last seven years!”

The words quoted above come from the introduction to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Time itself becomes one of the novel’s characters, slowing, accelerating, and sometimes almost stopping the narrative and action. From a certain point on, we can’t tell how much time has passed, how much time lies ahead. I have a strong conviction that, in a similar way, Roman Maciejewski’s Requiem is a work whose themes and characters include time. On the one hand, I think of a composer who writes his work over nearly fifteen years. He does this deliberately, after all, we know enough examples from the history of music to prove that it is possible to write a work of this magnitude in a much shorter time. This deliberate spacing of the compositional process was intended to give Maciejewski the opportunity to organically integrate his composition into the rhythm of life, harmony with nature, prayer, and meditation. On the other hand, I also think about the piece itself, which lasts approximately two hours and fifteen minutes. It presents a perceptual challenge for both listeners and performers. However, at the end, a unique reward awaits – the possibility of catharsis, catharsis, and peace.

This monumental piece is in matter of fact unfinished! Over the course of more than a decade, the first five parts of the Mass for the Dead were composed: Introit, Kyrie, Graduale, Tractus, and Dies irae. The Domine Jesu, Hostias, Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei are missing… How long would it take to perform then? How long would it take to compose it in such a case? Thinking about this issue in this way, we see that Roman Maciejewski’s Requiem is open to eternity, perpetuity and the moment foreseen in the Apocalypse when “time will be no more.”
After all, what are 135 minutes compared to eternity? In this composition, time has another aspect – therapeutic. Cleansing, psychotherapy, and healing require time. Just like meditation and prayer. These are not disciplines for the busy and impatient. Maciejewski’s Requiem similarly requires time to impact its listeners on a biological level, but also on a metaphysical one – it is music that, instead of “passing away,” chooses “lasting.”

Roman Maciejewski studied under Nadia Boulanger. They knew and valued him: Igor Strawiński, Francis Poulenc, Ingmar Bergman, Karol Szymanowski, Czesław Miłosz, Artur Rubinstein… Born in Berlin, originally from Leszno and educated in Poznań, he emigrated to the United States and Sweden. His extensive travels around the world have sought solitude in the backwoods and deserts. He founded and led distinguished choirs, turning down lucrative offers from Hollywood. While struggling with illness, he began practicing yoga, praying, and meditating until his symptoms subsided. His life story is a ready-made script for a film or a multi-episode televisionn series!

Writing Requiem, Roman Maciejewski was not only creating his opus magnum, but above all, he wanted to thank the Creator for his health restored after a seemingly incurable illness. He also wanted to come to terms with the horrors of World War II. The dedication on the first page of the score is categorical: ‘To the victims of human ignorance, To the victims of wars of all time, To the victims of tyrants’ torment, To the victims of human lawlessness, To the victims of the violation of the Divine order of nature’. The whole is preceded by a motto – the words of Christ spoken on the Cross (Lk 23:24): ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’.

Of course, we have many versions of Missa pro defunctis – with compositions by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Giuseppe Verdi, Gabirel Fauré, Benjamin Britten and Krzysztof Penderecki among the most prominent. However, Maciejewski’s composition has no parallel in the history of music. So what is this work like?
To quote the composer, ‘a few rays of light from this land where there is no time or space’. Maciejewski wanted “a bridge between the ancient past and the present.” His work was intended to be understandable, accessible, and inclusive – for people to listen to! And at the same time, simple, bringing reconciliation and peace. The composer wrote it in harmony with the surrounding world – in a rhythm combined with meditation and prayer, but also with nature. This is very Franciscan in spirit! Maciejewski complemented it with his fascination with hatha yoga. Giving voice to the composer: ‘I try to live so that my art proves that even in our times, man can live in harmony with himself, with others, and with God’.
The Requiem, therefore, stems from nature, is united with nature, and in a sense, we can say it is a holistic work. The work was written entirely in the major-minor scale. It’s no wonder the premiere at the avant-garde Warsaw Autumn Festival in 1960 was met with little enthusiasm. For the composer, major-minor represents a natural order: ‘I have never departed from the natural laws of acoustics: from sound with its entire structure. I base my work on a diatonic triad at the bottom, which, as it moves upwards, becomes increasingly chromatized […]’. So we have – as the composer’s method of operation – a pure bass foundation, in harmony with nature. Diatonically at the bottom, chromatically at the top – exactly as in the series of overtones, tones that make up each sound. The way the piece is written is meant to reflect the philosophy of music – a certain tribute to what music is composed of, its physical and acoustic principles! But the premise is also a long and calm, yogic breath, which translates into the shaping of phrases and melodies. The composer’s goal was not to depict the nightmare of war, but to provide solace, mental relaxation, liberation from tension, a deeper breath. In this understanding, the work is not only a contemplation of death, but equally a hope for life.

Or perhaps it’s simply an eclectic, understandable, and accessible work, with a triple, expansive, and monumental fugue (Kyrie) rigorously written in polyphony and counterpoint! These seem impossible assumptions! Yet the composer melds it all into a single whole in an extraordinary way, adding Gregorian chant, Baroque form, psalmody, a procession, a funeral procession, as well as inspirations from French music (Francis Poulenc!) and film. Treated as a painting, Dies Irae offers a vision presented through music that is most clearly programmatic and rhetorical. The Danse Macabre is depicted here in an unambiguous manner. But the division between heaven, hell, and earth is equally clear. Light—rendered musically from the very first bars—and its transformations become a separate theme! A vast performing apparatus: choir, orchestra (with quadruple woodwinds, celesta, harps, two pianos, and organ), and a quartet of soloists. The instrumentation is unusual and reminds me of the organ’s way of thinking about switching on and off subsequent voices.

I’m writing these words down in Leszno, Greater Poland, where the composer and his family came from. I’m sitting in his symbolic study, recreated in the Municipal Library. In a moment, I’ll walk to the Market Square and examine the plaque on the house where he lived. Finally, at the municipal cemetery, I’ll light a candle at the composer’s grave, a few dozen meters from my family’s grave.

If, on the eve of the day when, according to ancient tradition, we bow to the shadows of our loved ones, we seek solace, reflection, hope, but also cleansing and forgiveness, it seems to me that we can find them precisely in this music. “A ray of light from a land without time and space.” This is what I will be thinking about as I raise the baton tonight.

Adam Banaszak