“In 1917, in a bar just outside Oatman, Arizona, sat an old piano. Behind it there sat a seemingly older pianist. He’d been there since forever. No one could remember when he wasn’t. He played for tips and for drinks, and was happy to provide whatever music anyone wanted to hear. Occasionally he channeled the spirits of Schubert, Mahler, and Berg. Everyone had gotten kind of used to his musical meanderings over the years, and his music had led them to unexpected places. Oh yes, he talked kinda funny, and it was said he was Jewish. But I guess you suspected that.
This story is based on a story my father told me. In the early 1930s, as a young man, he and a few other WPA-lefty-artist friends drove across the country in an old jalopy. They arrived in Oatman, Arizona—a last chance, nearly abandoned mining town. It’s still there. They had run out of money and needed to get cash to buy food, gas and, most of all, to get out of Oatman. In the café/bar, there was a sign saying ‘Dance, Saturday Night—Pianist Wanted.’ My Dad, who could play any Gershwin, Berlin, swing, rumba, whatever number, asked for the job. ‘Just so long as you can play our music,’ said the guy behind the counter. Teddy signed on with total confidence. Imagine how startled he was on Saturday when they asked him to play the ‘Bear Fat Fling.’ Of course, he figured out how to play it. Amusingly, it was this same ‘Bear Fat Fling’ that was one of the tunes I later learned when I began performing Charles Ives’s music.
MTT and his father, Ted Thomas, in the desert
For my father, grandfather, and even great-grandfather, music was a lifelong journal, a confessional companion, into which new entries were always being added. It is much the same for me, and in composing these Meditations on Rilke, whose poems are so varied in mood and character, my own lifelong “musical journal” was a lens through which to view and express this poetry. My wish is that all people would have this kind of relationship to music—music spontaneously popping into their minds—perhaps in recollection and perhaps in anticipation of places within their spirits.
The Meditations on Rilke are based on motives that recur, recombine, and morph differently in each song. The opening piano solo in ‘Herbsttag’ (‘Autumn Day’) musically describes the opening paragraph of these notes. ‘Herbsttag’ was the first song to be written, and has existed for solo voice, solo trombone, solo cello, and now this orchestral version. It introduces most of the motives that are heard in the rest of the cycle. (Note that, while translator Robert Bly renders the title ‘Herbsttag’ as ‘October Day’ in the texts that follow, the literal English translation is ‘Autumn Day.’)
The fourth song, ‘Immer Wieder’ (‘Again, Again!’), is like a Schubert ‘cowboy song.’ My father often pointed out the similarity between songs like ‘Red River Valley’ to many of Schubert’s songs. The fifth song, ‘Imaginärer Lebenslauf’ (‘Imaginary Biography’), is a duet and was inspired by the wonderful opportunity of collaborating with Sasha Cooke and Ryan McKinny, who premiered the piece. The sixth song returns to the subject of autumn (‘Herbst.’) It opens with a flute solo that connects the motives from the earlier songs into one long melody.
The musical language in these songs is quite traditional. There are melodies, harmonies, bass lines, and invertible counterpoint. My greatest concern has always been about what remains with the listener when the music ends. It is my hope that these musical reflections of many years may stick with you.”
—Michael Tilson Thomas
“What Rilke, however, accomplishes in his poems, and what Tilson Thomas further improves upon theatrically and with no small debt to show business, is the transformation of alienation into amazement. These are somber songs. They look back — in one an imaginary life journey is from unselfconscious joy to a gasping for the breath of that early clear air (and this written just months before the pandemic!). They are a summing up. They need music that ranges widely. Tilson Thomas’ wistfulness goes to the edge of sentimentality but stops just in time to make sure we do not feel cheated. The music is full of wit and mimicry. Tilson Thomas’ songs may not sound like it, but they are, under it all, by the grandson of the “American Darling” of Yiddish theater, that meshuga mishmash of cultures where wisecracks and suffering are two sides of the same coin and where the worldly and the godly are two sides of a more valuable coin. Daringly playful, Tilson Thomas treats the fourth song, “Immer Wieder” (Again and Again) — an evocation of the mysterious, the terrifying silent abyss that awaits us as we lie down among flowers and face the sky — as “a Schubert cowboy song.” Whatever lies ahead has allure, these “Meditations” promise, as they unflinchingly carry a listener along. The vocal lines have an irresistible songfulness that is at the core of all Tilson Thomas’ music.”
Los Angeles Times
From the opening passage of honky-tonk piano, recalling a small-town sojourn of Rilke’s father, the score is startlingly eclectic. The reference point here is the orchestral songs of Mahler, and the cycle suggests a 21st-century version of that composer. That sounds odd with poetry by Rilke, which has a certain specific mood, but somehow it works, and the cycle has a pleasing quality of being jam-packed with ideas.”
All Music
Meditations on Rilke
Herbsttag
Herr, es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr gross.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
und auf den Fluren lass die Winde los.
Befiehl den letzten Früchten voll zu sein;
gib ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage
die letzte Süsse in den schweren Wein.
Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.
Ich lebe mein Leben
Ich lebe mein Leben in wachsenden Ringen,
die sich über die Dinge ziehn.
Ich werde den letzten vielleicht nicht vollbringen,
aber versuchen will ich ihn.
Ich kreise um Gott, um den uralten Turm,
und ich kreise jahrtausendelang;
und ich weiss noch nicht: bin ich ein Falke, ein Sturm
oder ein grosser Gesang.
Das Lied des Trinkers
Es war nicht in mir. Es ging aus und ein.
Da wollt ich es halten. Da hielt es der Wein.
(Ich weiss nicht mehr, was es war.)
Dann hielt er mir jenes und hielt mir dies,
bis ich mich ganz auf ihn verliess.
Ich Narr.
Jetzt bin ich in seinem Spiel, und er streut
mich verächtlich herum und verliert mich noch heut
an dieses Vieh, an den Tod.
Wenn der mich, schmutzige Karte, gewinnt,
so kratzt er mit mir seinen grauen Grind
und wirft mich fort in den Kot.
Immer wieder
Immer wieder, ob wir der Liebe Landschaft auch kennen
und den kleinen Kirchhof mit seinen klagenden Namen
und die furchtbar verschweigende Schlucht, in welcher die anderen enden:
immer wieder gehn wir zu zweien hinaus
unter die alten Bäume, lagern uns immer wieder
zwischen die Blumen, gegenüber dem Himmel.
Imaginärer Lebenslauf
Erst eine Kindheit, grenzenlos und ohne
Verzicht und Ziel. O unbewusste Lust.
Auf einmal Schrecken, Schranke, Schule, Frohne
und Absturz in Versuchung und Verlust.
Trotz. Der Gebogene wird selber Bieger
und rächt an anderen, dass er erlag.
Geliebt, gefürchtet, Retter, Ringer, Sieger
und Überwinder, Schlag auf Schlag.
Und dann allein im Weiten, Leichten, Kalten.
Doch tief in der errichteten Gestalt
ein Atemholen nach dem Ersten, Alten…
Da stürzte Gott aus seinem Hinterhalt.
Herbst
Die Blätter fallen, fallen wie von weit,
als welkten in den Himmeln ferne Gärten;
sie fallen mit verneinender Gebärde.
Und in den Nächten fällt die schwere Erde
aus allen Sternen in die Einsamkeit.
Wir alle fallen. Diese Hand da fällt.
Und sieh dir andre an: es ist in allen.
Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen
unendlich sanft in seinen Händen hält.
October Day
Oh Lord, it’s time, it’s time. It was a great summer.
Lay your shadow now on the sundials,
and on the open fields let the winds go!
Give the tardy fruits the hint to fill;
give them two more Mediterranean days,
drive them on into their greatness, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.
Whoever has no house by now will not build.
Whoever is alone now will remain alone,
will wait up, read, write long letters,
and walk along sidewalks under large trees,
not going home, as the leaves fall and blow away.
I Live My Life in Growing Orbits
I live my life in growing orbits
which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt.
I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years,
and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm,
or a great song.
The Song the Drunkard Sings
It wasn’t really inside me. It came in and went again.
I wanted to hold it. But the wine was holding it.
(I’ve forgotten now exactly what it was.)
Then he held this out to me, and that out to me,
till I was completely dependent on him.
I’m an ass.
Now I’m playing his game, and he throws me here and there,
wherever he pleases, and maybe today he’ll lose
me to that pig, death.
When death has won me, the smudged-up card,
he will scratch his old scabs with me
and toss me on the heap.
Again, Again!
Again, again, even if we know the countryside of love,
and the tiny churchyard with its names mourning,
and the chasm, more and more silent, terrifying, into which the others
dropped: we walk out together anyway
beneath the ancient trees, we lie down again,
again, among the flowers, and face the sky.
Imaginary Biography
First childhood, no limits, no renunciations,
no goals. Such unthinking joy.
Then abruptly terror, schoolrooms, boundaries, captivity,
and a plunge into temptation and deep loss.
Defiance. The one crushed will be the crusher now,
and he avenges his defeats on others.
Loved, feared, he rescues, wrestles, wins,
and overpowers others, slowly, act by act.
And then all alone in space, in lightness, in cold.
But deep in the shape he has made to stand erect
he takes a breath, as if reaching for the First, Primitive…
Then God explodes from his hiding place.
Autumn
The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning “no.”
And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all the other stars in the loneliness.
We’re all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one…. It’s in them all.
And yet there is Someone, whose hands
infinitely calm, hold up all this falling.
Translations: From Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, A Translation from the German and Commentary by Robert Bly. Copyright © 1981 by Robert Bly. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Notable Performances
Los Angeles Philharmonic
Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor
New York Philharmonic
Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor
Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich
Paavo Järvi, conductor
Louisville Orchestra
Teddy Abrams, conductor