Oskar Morawetz
Oskar Morawetz has been in Toronto since 1940, the year he fled his native
Czechoslovakia. Among the most senior Faculty members, he has established a
large catalogue of works, taken many awards and fellowships, and seen his
compositions performed by important American and European orchestras. He is
probably the most widely performed Canadian composer.
Morawetz considers himself a largely self-taught composer. He had little
formal training as a composer in Europe, and began his music education as a
pianist. "I was by the standards of any piano teacher a bad student. I was
hungry for new scores: by age seventeen I had a good knowledge of some
twenty-five operas, including Wagner. The business of repeating a piece until a
teacher considered it perfect didn't interest me; I had no patience. Obviously I
wasn't destined to be a performer."
Prof. Morawetz feels that too many students take the opposite attitude.
"There are people here who are content to know ten or fifteen pieces perfectly,
and it is almost impossible to change their ways. They may becomes reasonably
good teachers, though often enough, even in our own Conservatory, they go on to
teach the same pieces they learned as children. Generally I am much more
interested in new works than new performances. I know the standard numbers so
well that a bigger retard here or louder entry there is not very significant to
me."
Morawetz rejects the academic excommunication of composers sometimes
considered sentimental or unprogressive. "I don't see why I can't admire
Bernstein and Gounod as well as Berg and Stravinsky. I feel strongly that
Puccini was one of the most gifted opera composers of all times; it's no
accident that after fifty years he continues to be performed.
Morawetz applies this eclecticism to serial music as well. "Schoenberg,
Webern and Berg are often put into the same basket because they were friends and
all worked at the same time, but in my opinion Berg was a giant compared to the
other two. You don't need a theoretical introduction to enjoy Berg. Schoenberg,
while a great mind and a revolutionary, lacked, to use an unfashionable term,
inspiration. People nowadays are carried away by the technical abilities of
composers, just as in Beethoven's day Albrechtsberger and Fux were considered
great because they new [sic] counterpoint so thoroughly."
Morawetz's own technique is formidable - he has written a passacaglia in a
style of Bach which continues to be praised as a fine orchestration of that
master - but his style is unique, personal, and very accessible. Along with
From the Diary of Anne Frank for soprano and orchestra, his best remembered
composition is the Memorial to Martin Luther King, a tone poem for cello
and orchestra based on the events surrounding King's death.
The King project in a sense began before the assassination. In 1967,
Rostropovich asked Morawetz to write something different for cello, claiming to
"have enough concertos". A few sketches were started without success. "I didn't
know much about him before it happened, but I learned a great deal in the next
few days from T.V. specials. I think it was during the coverage of his burial,
when I saw the words of his favourite spiritual, "Free at Last", inscribed on
his tombstone, that I thought of writing a funeral march using that spiritual."
Illness prevented Rostropovich from premiering the work in 1973, but it has
been recorded very successfully by Zara Nelsova and the Toronto Symphony.
