Requiem for Jan Palach for SATB Soprano Solo and Organ with Latin, Czech and English texts, commissioned by Czech Embassy in Luxembourg, for the 40th anniversary of Jan Palach's protest self-immolation in Prague. 1st performance at the Limpertsberg Church, Luxembourg City, at 19.00 on January 29th 2009. Duration 37 minutes.
Requiem for Jan Palach (Op.182). This Requiem, written in July, 2008, does not offer visions of sanctity, paradise and redemption. Nor is it a celebration of life, or death. By adding to some of the traditional Latin text mighty lines from Jan Hus (some of which are inscribed on his monument in the Old Town Square in Prague), some graffiti which appeared, very briefly, on the Wenceslas Monument just after Jan Palach’s death, and which were rapidly removed, and other words from the Prague of 1968 and 1969 as well as Article One of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the music seeks to confront the horror of a despairing suicide, the smell of petrol and burning flesh and desperation in the face of overwhelming political brutality. Traditional consolation (in the shape, here, of two quotations from the sweetest of Requiems, that of Gabriel Fauré) is irrelevant, and thus violently dispensed with. Eternal Light is replaced by the incandescence of flames. Enduring values are sought. The hope implied by ethical statements is subordinated to the vital necessity of remembering. The music is tonal, despite dissonance, and cyclical. Themes and motifs recur, particularly an organ phrase which seeks to evoke rising heat and flame. At times anguished, the music resolves into stable tonalities associated with enduring ethical concepts. In other places the treatment is almost bucolic, and perhaps with a feel of Bohemia. There is a place for innocence. It has been an honour to write this work, in memory of Jan Palach and of the others who suffered, protested and fought for us all in Prague.