Portrait of the Artist: Oskar Morawetz
Oskar Morawetz might have become a conductor of opera. He was eighteen when he started working at the Prague Opera in a very junior capacity. In the next year George Szell recommended him for a conductor's post, but he chose to study further in Vienna and Paris. The Second World War broke out and, after various trials comparable to those dramatized by Menotti in The Consul, he joined his parents in Toronto in 1940.
"If you think of your fellow creatures, then you only want to cry, you could really cry the whole day long." Anne Frank wrote these words at the age of fourteen; and they are part of the passage chosen by Oskar Morawetz for his 1970 composition for solo soprano and orchestra. From the Diary of Anne Frank was first performed by Lois Marshall and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.
Dr. Morawetz chose to orchestrate the scene in which Anne remembers a
school friend, Lies Goosens, who was then in a concentration camp. The words are a prayer for her friend's survival. Lies did survive; Anne died in Belsen. Mr. Frank, Anne's father, was unable to attend the work's premiere but he sent roses to Miss Marshall and
to Dr. Morawetz a silver dish which had been a wedding present in 1925. "It is one of the few possessions which have been spared from our former household," he wrote to the composer from his home in Switzerland "and I thought you would enjoy having it." An unexpected member of the audience on the premiere night was Victor Kugler, who had sheltered the Frank family in Amsterdam and who now lives in Toronto.
From the Diary of Anne Frank was later played in Carnegie Hall, with Karel Ancerl conducting the TSO, and in Washington. Plans for recording it were interrupted by Mr. Ancerl' s death.
Dr. Morawetz received a special award from the Segal Foundation for this work and it is soon to be the first Canadian composition to be played by the Israel Philharmonic, under its conductor Zubin Mehta. Adi Ezion will sing the solo part. Dr. Morawetz will travel to Israel and hopes to meet there Lies Goosens.
From the Diary of Anne Frank is a twenty-minute
musical monologue - perhaps the closest Dr. Morawetz will ever come to realising his dream of writing an opera. When he was a child in Prague the musical stage was his first love; by the age of sixteen, he had probably seen only two movies and had certainly seen over eighty operas. He persuaded his mother to buy him scores and played them all day long on the piano - except for the times he had to spend at school where he accommodated himself to his teachers' contrary ideas by studying the scores behind his textbooks.
He never lost his love of the human voice and his delight in the dramatic marriage between music and
words. Among the more than fifty works that Dr. Morawetz has written are many poems arranged for solo voice or choirs. It started by accident - or so he believes. As a young graduate from the University of Toronto in the mid-'40s, he was befriended by Mrs. Edmund Boyd who was for many years president of the women's committee of the Toronto Symphony. Mrs. Boyd frequently invited the young composer to her beautiful home where he met many famous artists
and also Mrs. Boyd's shy daughter, the poet Anne Wilkinson. He found her work very morose but did set three of the poems to music. They were the first songs he wrote. One of them, Elegy, begins with the words,
I am so tired I do not think
Sleep in death can rest me
"Oh, what horrible words," pronounced a well-known singer of the time as she rejected the song. It was first performed by Dorothy
Maynor and recorded by
James Milligan. It has since proved one of the most popular of Dr. Morawetz' works for solo voices and was most
recently recorded by Jon Vickers. In spite of some critics' self-conscious reaction: Why doesn't he use world poets?, he has continued to find inspiration in Canadian poetry - including that of Archibald Lampman, Carman Bliss and, for his most recent vocal work, Pauline Johnson's The Song My Paddle
Sings. (This last was commissioned by the Ontario Choral Federation for a scholarship competition held in memory of Leslie Bell.)
The opera remains a dream as composers cannot help but be influenced by conditions in the country in which they live; to spend three or four years giving birth to an opera in Canada where
it might receive three or four performances would be a thankless labour.
In the mid-1960s Rostropovich asked Dr. Morawetz to write a work for him. Not a concerto, he said, something different. About a year later Oskar Morawetz watched Martin Luther King's funeral on television. Memorial to Martin Luther King, for
'cello and orchestra, incorporates at the end a favourite spiritual of The Reverend King the words of which are inscribed on his tombstone: Free at Last, played in a very slow march tempo, like a dirge.
Rostropovich never performed the work. He had scheduled it for a Canadian tour in Vancouver and Edmonton in 1970 and Mrs. King had been invited to one of the concerts. Three days before the tour was to begin, a cable arrived from Russia to say that the great
'cellist was sick. When Rostropovich finally fled to the West he told Oskar Morawetz
quite openly that he could not afford to play a new work until he had built
up his finances for a few years. Zara Nelsova was offered the work, played it and recorded it.
Music for Oskar Morawetz must have an emotional message; but not all his works sing in sombre tones. Father William (from Alice in Wonderland) is a much-liked song and his Carnival Overture has spread its happy sounds around the world.
When he talks about From the Diary of Anne Frank, it is clear that the work is the closest to his heart. When he remembers his Passacaglia on a Bach Chorale, dedicated to the memory
of John F. Kennedy, he chuckles. The work is a private joke for him. As a student he always excelled in and delighted in writing fugues in the style of Bach. When many composers began to orchestrate works of Bach in solemn remembrance of President Kennedy, Oskar Morawetz decided to write an original piece in Bach's style. It was easy for him and at the same time he was doing something he always wanted to do. It would be so nice if one could always. . . but people would laugh.
Dr. Morawetz doesn't have much use for ultra-modern music with all its gimmicks. One reason for his
great admiration for Benjamin Britten, whom he considers the greatest composer born in this century, is that Mr. Britten also has no use for crazy avant-garde experiments. At Expo
'67 Oskar Morawetz told Benjamin Britten of his feelings about his work. Mr. Britten was taken aback, became embarrassed like a schoolboy and then put his hand on Dr. Morawetz' shoulder and said, "Well, that's very nice, but keep it to yourself otherwise you'll have lots of enemies."
Oskar Morawetz has been teaching at the University of Toronto for over thirty years, while his works have been performed by orchestras and performers around the world. For his Bachelor of Music at the university in 1944 he wrote his String Quartet No.1 which won a nation-wide competition organised by CAPAC (Composers Authors and Publishers Association of Canada). The following year his Sonata Tragica for piano won the same competition. His Piano Concerto No.1 was awarded first prize by Zubin Mehta in a competition held
by the Montreal Symphony in 1961 and his Sinfonietta for Winds and Percussion won the
Critics' Award in an international competition for contemporary music in Italy in 1966. He has written two symphonies and was the first Canadian composer recorded by Glenn Gould.
On April 23, at the Guelph Spring Festival, Oskar Morawetz will offer us once again a work for a solo instrument. The Hamilton Philharmonic, conducted by Boris Brott, will give the première of his Concerto for Harp and Orchestra. Erica Goodman will be the soloist. The singular voice.
At the age of six, Oskar's mother called to him one day and said there was somebody in the house who could show him how to play the piano; would he like to come upstairs? It sounded a simple matter. He went. He was very disappointed that after the first lesson he did not know how to play.
When the family moved to Prague two years later he continued piano lessons; but all his teachers wanted to make him into a great pianist and demanded that he practise for hours every day. Nothing bored him more than staying with a piece more than three or four days - he always wanted to go on to the next one. He had many good piano teachers; but he became a composer, a field in which he considers himself completely self-taught.
