published on
Triptych for Baritone, Choir, Organ, and Electronics
I Of True Obedience
II About Brother Heinrich, Burned in Ditmar
III I Am Black / Song of Songs
Music: Peter Heeren
Word Collage: Nikola Anne Mehlhorn
Original Texts: Brother Eckhart, Doctor Luther, Song of Songs
Sönke Tams Freier: Baritone
Marner and Poppenbüttel Kantorei
Samuel Nauck: Organ
Conductor: Michael Kriener
Prolegomenon
The composition "Triptych for Baritone, mixed choir, organ, and electronics" was created in 2017 as a commissioned work for the Dithmarschen Church District for the Luther Year. It premiered on June 10, 2017, at St. Petri's Main Church in Hamburg as part of the "Night of Choirs," performed by the Poppenbüttel and Marner Kantorei under the direction of Church Music Director Michael Kriener.
In this musical work, the composer Peter Heeren designs a three-part altarpiece of sounds. The connection to the Reformation year 2017 is established through the combination of selected texts: pre-Reformation, Reformation, and timeless passages from Master Eckhart, Martin Luther, as well as excerpts from the Song of Songs in the Old Testament.
Master Eckhart, like Luther later, was one of those church teachers whose beliefs were viewed with suspicion by the church authorities of the time. His core statement was, "Know nothing, want nothing, have nothing." According to Peter Heeren, this practice of abstinence results in a transcendent state in his music: cross-shaped ascending, tonally graphic scales lead to a key change symbolizing the transition to the afterlife. Ultimately, these scale runs culminate in an orgiastic climax.
A modern element is introduced into the Triptych with Luther's text "About Brother Heinrich, burned in Ditmar" (musically accompanied by Luther's hymn "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God"). It recalls the barbaric "adolescent phase" of Christianity, drawing a connection to the current crisis in another religion: Islam, whose extremist branches contaminate our present with brutal terror.
"God's will knows no 'why'"—this gravestone inscription contradicts our need for assured knowledge. The searching and groping of people are depicted in the "middle altarpiece" through never-ending, unclassifiable scales that move within a narrow framework.
Who doesn't know the dictate of love? Who doesn't know the feeling of being at love's mercy? Who doesn't know the desire to be liberated from love? In the third part of the Triptych, the listener experiences a catalog of love feelings: the music can be brutal, blissful, seductive by turns. At the end, the choir joyfully exclaims, "I am black" (instead of "I love you").
And the organ mimics the overly blissful passages of the choir: being blissfully happy down here is not so easily achieved without consequences.
A distinctive feature of Heeren's composition style is a sine tone that is played from a separate tape parallel to the choir's sounds, penetrating the scale structure on one hand and paradoxically enhancing all the sounds on the other.
Nikola Anne Mehlhorn
- Genre
- Classical