These Words ...

These Words … for string orchestra and percussion instruments was commissioned from Arvo Pärt by the Sonning Music Foundation, who wished to award the composer with the most important distinction in the Danish music world, the Léonie Sonning Music Prize. The piece premiered at the award ceremony on 22 May 2008 in the Radio Denmark Concert Hall in Copenhagen, performed by the Radio Denmark Symphony Orchestra conducted by Tõnu Kaljuste.

It is an instrumental composition, with its music stemming from text. Pärt has chosen a fragment from the Orthodox Canon to the Guardian Angel as the basis for this piece – a greater part of this end prayer in Church Slavonic. The prayer is meant to keep people from committing crimes and succumbing to human weaknesses and is expressed by…

These Words … for string orchestra and percussion instruments was commissioned from Arvo Pärt by the Sonning Music Foundation, who wished to award the composer with the most important distinction in the Danish music world, the Léonie Sonning Music Prize. The piece premiered at the award ceremony on 22 May 2008 in the Radio Denmark Concert Hall in Copenhagen, performed by the Radio Denmark Symphony Orchestra conducted by Tõnu Kaljuste.

It is an instrumental composition, with its music stemming from text. Pärt has chosen a fragment from the Orthodox Canon to the Guardian Angel as the basis for this piece – a greater part of this end prayer in Church Slavonic. The prayer is meant to keep people from committing crimes and succumbing to human weaknesses and is expressed by the music featuring unstable and dissonant intervals. A simple text is added in-between the prayer phrases: Holy Angel, my Guardian, pray for me. This interlude runs as a refrain through the entire composition in the form of a string pizzicato motif of triplets which, in the culmination of the work, is instead played with bows.

The title of the work is taken from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Queen Gertrude’s passage in Act 3, Scene 4), creating a connection with Denmark as the commissioning country.

Gertrude: O Hamlet, speak no more:
Thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul;
And there I see such black and grained spots
As will not leave their tinct ...

O, speak to me no more;
These words, like daggers, enter in mine ears;
No more, sweet Hamlet!
 

Arvo Pärt: “I was brought to this title by an association with Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Just like the Queen in Shakespeare’s tragedy was shaken by the revealing words of her son, I am similarly shaken by the words of the Canon to the Guardian Angel that I used to compose this piece.” (Programme sheet for the Estonian premiere, 21.07.2008)

These Words … became a seed that fell into fertile soil. Working with the Canon to the Guardian Angel, the composer developed a wish to use this text in its longer form. A commission from the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra became the impetus resulting in composing Symphony No. 4 (2008). The music of These Words … found its place in the central part of the three-movement symphony.