Mirrors

About the music

“With “Mirrors”, the Brühl saxophonist and jazz composer Matthias Petzold presented his third project for large forces on 28 September 2012, after the “Psalmen und Lobgesänge” for choir and jazz ensemble and “Pangäa” for big band. “Mirrors” is a suite for symphony orchestra and jazz combo with three soloists on trumpet, tenor and baritone saxophone. The compositions draw on motifs from William Shakespeare’s plays and poems and, from there, develop a labyrinth of movements, reflections and tonal colours, of violent and tender moods.

Mirrors

A few notes on the compositions

This text comes from the programme booklet for the premiere of the suite on 28 September 2012

Through the titles of its individual pieces and the dramatic shape of the music, the suite “Mirrors” has a literary subtext: all the pieces but one refer to characters or plays by William Shakespeare.

One might ask whether such an approach makes sense at all, whether it does not rob the music of its independence – and, to put it more sharply, whether the composer is not making a cheap attempt to enhance his music by sticking a famous name on it.

First of all: of course you can listen to the “Mirrors” suite as pure music too. Since I have not written programme music – the link to Shakespeare does not lie in a musical depiction of the plays – you do not necessarily need to know the literary connections. So anyone could put this text down at this point with a clear conscience and concentrate on the music.

All the same, knowing how I as a composer responded to my sources opens up a further dimension of the compositions that is interesting for the listener too. This additional dimension had a decisive influence on the process of composition. What follows is therefore an invitation to get to know this side of the pieces.

Oberon

Oberon is the first piece of the suite that I composed, even though it now comes third in the order of the suite. When I wrote it, I had no intention whatsoever of writing a longer work. I wanted to try out writing for orchestra and, in the summer holidays of 2003, when we could not go away because we were moving house, to do something I enjoyed alongside the renovating. The title only came during the composing: the exceptionally hot summer, with a lot of time spent by the lake and in the woods (with glow-worms!), reminded me of the atmosphere of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, and above all of the figure of Oberon, king of the fairies, who thus gave the piece its title.

When Shall We Three Meet Again? (Violence And Love)

Only after a provisional performance of “Oberon” by the Collegium Musicum of the Brühl music school had shown that my way of writing for orchestra worked at all did I decide to expand the project and pursue it further. It was in this context that the idea came up of taking the link to Shakespeare as a common thread. Years before, I had seen “Macbeth” in the theatre and had been struck by the relentlessness of its violence and the dark mood of the play. At the beginning of 2005 this seemed to me a suitable vehicle for reflecting the news of war and violence from all over the world.

I wrote the opening sequence (now the beginning of the concert) as a reflection of aggression and violence, in a way I had never composed before. Afterwards I realised that I could not, and did not want to, go on composing like that. For me the violence of the opening called for a counterweight, which was then provided by the slow blues that breaks in abruptly. As the piece goes on, the two levels stand side by side and become more and more connected through their motifs – something I had not planned at all, but which came about by itself in the course of the work.

So the piece as a whole is not to be heard as a portrayal of the tragedy of “Macbeth”, but as a compositional response to the themes the play raises. The quintessence might be that aggression and gentleness are two sides of the same coin. If the aggression can be meaningfully bound into the whole, its positive quality remains: energy.

Mirrors

The piece “Mirrors”, which was composed next and comes second in the concert order, is the only one not based on a literary motif. For me the mirror was an emblem of Shakespeare’s world, in which things are often other than they seem and in which people wander about in a fleeting world full of deceptions. The way it is composed – with fugal entries, polyphonic voice-leading, mirrored motifs and dynamic contrasts – takes up devices from the music of the 16th and 17th centuries, though without imitating its sound.

Ophelia´s Dream

“Ophelia´s Dream” is the second pillar of the whole suite, the second engagement with destructive processes. In “Hamlet”, Ophelia is Hamlet’s beloved. He loves her sincerely and wants to marry her. But because he is too weak and too cowardly to confront his stepfather, who murdered his father, openly, Hamlet stages an intrigue. As part of that intrigue he also rejects Ophelia. Although from his point of view he only does so for appearance’s sake, she is broken by it, goes mad and finally takes her own life.

The composition works with sharp sounds, chromatically shifted chords and fraying structures. At the culmination of the destruction the mood tips over: behind the dark wall, things go on after all. The theme of the opening is reinterpreted in harmony and sound. It loses its ambivalence and heaviness and sounds light and bright. So here too it is not merely a matter of depicting destruction, but of a way of coming to terms with it through creativity.

Star-Crossed Lovers

The last movement of the suite is a composition by Duke Ellington, arranged and expanded by me, which he wrote as a commission for a Shakespeare festival in Canada. The play that gives it its title is of course “Romeo and Juliet”. In his unshakeable kindliness (which led the bassist Charles Mingus to call one of his compositions “Duke Ellington´s Sound of Love”), Ellington blanks out the tragic and violent side of the play completely. “Star-Crossed Lovers” is a calm, sonorous, flowing hymn to a love that overcomes everything. As such, the piece is both my bow to one of the greatest composers of the 20th century and the most fitting close imaginable for the whole suite.

Sonnet To The Dark Lady

Although it was written for a completely different line-up, the piece “Sonnet To The Dark Lady” belongs to the same group of compositions as the orchestral pieces. While Shakespeare’s dramatic works found their way into pieces for symphony orchestra and jazz combo, the smaller line-up of a saxophone quartet seemed right for the more fleeting sonnets.

In the 154 sonnets that Shakespeare wrote within four years to an unknown beloved (the “Dark Lady”) and to a friend, every facet of love is reflected in unbridled, sometimes seemingly exaggerated emotions: happiness, despair, jealousy, longing, self-loathing, admiration, distance. I have tried to translate this into music with three themes: one calm and self-assured, one cheerful and lively, and one subdued and melancholy. These three are introduced, mingle, break off, flare up again and finally disappear.

Matthias Petzold, September 2012