Echoes of a Solitary Voice: based on a fragment by Lorin Maazel (2015)
for orchestra
Program Note – Echoes of a Solitary Voice
How fortunate I am to have known Maestro Lorin Maazel. I cherish his mentorship and the time shared with him, his wife Dietlinde and their remarkable family in their home in Castleton, Virginia.
Before his death in July 2014, Maazel was composing a work for the Danish National Symphony as part of the Orchestra’s long-standing Malko Conducting Competition. This new piece was to be concise, multifaceted, and above all, a challenge for even the most talented young conductors competing from around the globe.
The great loss of Lorin Maazel prevented this work from coming to completion. In November, four months after Maestro Maazel’s death, Dietlinde asked me to examine the sketches and autograph manuscript of his unfinished score. To study these primary source materials in Maazel’s own hand was captivating and revealing. Even in his early drafts, one could clearly see the Maestro’s painstaking attention to detail, each note written with keen understanding of orchestration; all clearly evident on each of the sixteen pages Maazel had thus far completed. The last page, numbered seventeen, was blank.
After examining Maazel’s sketch and fragment, Dietlinde asked me to use this work in some capacity and incorporate it into a new composition of my own. What a daunting endeavor!
To complete this fragment as Maazel would have done was impossible. I chose to proceed not by conjecturing the infinite possibilities of what he might have written, but instead by carefully examining what he actually composed. Rather than beginning from a single fragment and moving forward, I chose to absorb the essence of this unfinished sketch as well as the core of his completed works: his opera 1984 and his symphonic compositions—Music for Violin and Orchestra, Music for Cello and Orchestra, Farewells, The Giving Tree. It soon became apparent that despite the Maestro’s renown as a conductor, he was greatly underappreciated as the creator of a substantial body of highly original compositions.
Though Echoes of a Solitary Voice is my own, every aspect of its origins can be traced to Maazel’s sketches and fragment. The music weaves in and out of this given material, at times making explicit use of his melodic gestures, harmonies, rhythms, and textures, but, more often allowing his elements to develop, evolve and meld into new ideas and structures. The result is a tribute to another facet of a great genius of our time: Lorin Maazel, the composer.
Wayne Oquin
March 9, 2015
New York, New York