Polish Requiem - Oratorian Music Theatre

Oratorian Music Theatre

Regina Chłopicka, an author of studies on Penderecki's music, wrote about his work in relation to earlier funeral masses: "He reaches out for a number of traditional elements, yet transforms them, builds a new hierarchy and subjugates grand dramatic forms of a monumental, theatrical character to his own, original concept. The Polish Requiem could be called a dramatic oratorio or an oratorian music theatre whose main subject is man’s attitude to death. Instead of God, however, this theatre puts man in the centre rather than God, and focuses on his vacillation between hope and doubt and faith and despair and his pursuit of universal values and of the sense of existence. The oratorian music theatre of the 'Polish Requiem' is staged within four main dimensions, four zones of symbolic meanings. The first of them is offered by the music theatre of horror invoked by the vision of the Last Judgment and from the sequence 'Dies irae' and the responsorium 'Libera me'. The second one is born out of references to communal rituals of prayer which form a kind of a mystery theatre. The third sphere expresses the feelings and emotions of a man analyzing his living, while the fourth one - which could be termed the "Polish' zone" - shows Penderecki's ties with the 'here and now', the man’s rooting in the history of his time".