One of Semyon Bychkov’s artistic goals with the Czech Philharmonic is to perform music by contemporary composers, and not just compositions that have already been written and performed elsewhere. The Czech Philharmonic has approached nine Czech and five foreign composers, who have written or are writing new works for the orchestra. One of them is the 62-year-old composer Detlev Glanert. A native of Hamburg, Germany, he and the chief conductor of the Czech Philharmonic share not only a close personal friendship, but also a similar artistic outlook. Bychkov has repeatedly conducted Glanert’s works all around Europe, and he regards him as one of today’s most interesting composers: “I greatly admire Detlev’s music. He’s an outstanding opera composer with a feeling for the text and a sense of drama and philosophy. The first time I heard his Requiem for Hieronymus Bosch, I was brought to tears in several places by how beautiful the music is. That doesn’t happen to me often with contemporary music.”
In recent years, the Czech Philharmonic was supposed to have given three performances of Glanert’s music. In January 2019 there was a performance of the brief orchestral composition Weites Land based on motifs from Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. Then the Czech premiere of the monumental Requiem for Hieronymus Bosch was planned for March 2020. Composed for the 500th anniversary of the great Dutch painter’s death, it was commissioned by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Unfortunately, the coronavirus pandemic forced the cancellation of what would have been an extraordinary musical event. A few years later, Glanert’s Prague Symphony met with the same fate, when the Czech Philharmonic was supposed to have become the first orchestra in the world to perform it. While the performance of the symphony has been rescheduled successfully, and the work is finally being given its world premiere in Prague, the artistically and logistically more demanding Requiem, which requires not only a symphony orchestra, but also a quartet of vocal soloists, a narrator, and two choirs, is still awaiting its opportunity.
Detlev Glanert is acclaimed above all as a composer of works for voice and orchestra, and he has 14 operas to his credit. Even in his Prague Symphony, inspired by the Czech capital city and by Franz Kafka, he has not avoided working with a text and the human voice. The composer has written his own libretto using excerpts from Kafka’s lesser-known poetry, which he has entrusted to a pair of singers. Glanert’s teacher was the German opera composer Hanz Werner Henze, but in his music we also observe inspiration from Brahms, Mahler, Strauss, and even Maurice Ravel. Glanert sees the composers of the Second Viennese School as his musical forefathers. At the same time, however, he says that he gives precedence to melodies over tone rows, and he is even unafraid to speak of some kind of musical beauty, however subjectively it may be perceived. Glanert also regards making a connection with the listener as especially important: “A work has to tell you something about what is going on in real people’s lives. It has to tell you something about the world you live in and something about you, personally. This principle applies in opera just like in orchestral music. And if it isn’t there, the work is dead.”
Glanert patterned his latest symphony after Prague itself and after Franz Kafka’s descriptions of the city in his works. “Prague never lets go. Neither of you, nor of me. This little mother has claws”, wrote Kafka to his schoolmate Oskar Pollak. Glanert took inspiration from Kafka’s less familiar poetic texts, letters, and diary entries, and using fragments from them he put together his own libretto. He conceived the symphony as a sequence of twelve songs linked directly together, thereby creating a continuous flow of about 45 minutes of music. For Glanert as an experienced opera composer, the human voice is one of the key media for dramatic communication, and he is also capable of using every nuance of vocal colour to express the whole range of moods and emotions. For his Prague Symphony, he has used lower-pitched voices, mezzo-soprano and bass-baritone. That combination seems to give the best reflection of the sometimes enchanting and sometimes dark mood of Kafkaesque, mystical Prague.
