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Lagrime
, and though Peter was quite fa-
miliar with a lot of the music of Orlando
di Lasso, including some of the peniten-
tial pieces and songs, but he didn’t know
this particular piece.”
“I investigated it, and then Grant
called and challenged me: ‘Okay, Peter,
you have to stage the
Lagrime di San
Pietro
.’—‘No, I don’t!’ ” recalls Sellars,
giggling at his initial de ance. “It is the
hardest music; it truly makes Ligeti
seem like something you have for break-
fast. e vocal writing is so stunningly
detailed, but the way the chords are
formed is so intricate. And then the
idea of actually staging it—well, nobody
has ever, ever tried
to memorize an
hour and twenty
minutes of Renais-
sance polyphony.
It doesn’t happen.
In the early-mu-
sic groups that
undertake this stu ,
there are scores and
singers standing up
and looking straight
ahead into their
scores. And so the
idea of getting to
know this music by
heart is—you know,
from any music, as
soon as you mem-
orize it, you have a
completely di er-
ent grasp of it. It’s
completely di erent
from just reading it in a performance.”
“I remember Peter saying that if we
were to actually undertake this project,”
says Gershon, “it will be the hardest
thing that either one of us will have ever
done. I thought it was hyperbole at the
time, but it turned it to be true. Over the
course of the next three years, we were
working on other projects and would
periodically come back to this idea of
staging
Lagrime
. One of the things that
we thought about from the beginning
was that the staging itself should be very
simple and austere: no sets, no props,
the performers in street clothes—really
let the music and the singing movement
speak for the piece. I think that was a
very wise decision. It leaves it to the
audience to focus purely on the sing-
ers singing, and then there’s no barrier
between the audience and the emotional
and the spiritual content of the piece.
“In pretty much all of Peter’s work,
movement is key to the text. What I love
about Peter’s contrapuntal work like this
is that because the movements are key to
words and phrases, as they reach di er-
ent points in the musical polyphony, we
actually see musical embodiment. Each
group of three singers on each individ-
ual part is in unison yet in counterpoint
RAVINIA MAGAZINE | SEPTEMBER 3, 2018 – MAY 11, 2019
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