Elegy
In Memory of Leonard Bernstein
String Orchestra
Date of Composition: 1990
PROGRAM NOTES:
I composed the Elegy during the first 18 days of November 1990 in memory of Leonard Bernstein. In the five years before his death, “Lenny” and I had entered into a degree of camaraderie. Especially memorable during that time were two mid-winter dinner parties at my house in Hartford where he would play and sing and hold forth until the early hours of the morning. And then, like a scene from a 40’s movie, he and his band of revelers would pile into an old station wagon for the drive through the Connecticut snow back to his house in Fairfield. It seemed impossible that so much human energy could ever vanish from our lives.
The Elegy falls into the tradition of the Déploration, a work written out of love and respect for a great musician. It is an outpouring of sentiment – something that Bernstein, in his art, was strong enough to sustain and to confirm throughout his life. Such open emotions, such profound empathy, was particular to the man, and is quite rare in our ultra-rational 20th-century.
Several passages in the Elegy allude to music with which Bernstein identified and that he brought to the attention of the music world. The work opens with a bare texture of solo violins, soon gathering instruments to include the whole string orchestra. In contrast to the opening, the middle sections are texturally and harmonically rich and sonorous, as only full strings can be. A plangent, five-beat repeated figure begins the final section, which builds to a sustained, fortissimo rocking motion between two chords. The coda is again soft and simple in texture, ending the work with the other-worldly sounds of double bass harmonics.
James Sellars
Hartford, Connecticut
November, 1990