Im großen Schweigen

Program notes

About the Work

Im großen Schweigen (In the Great Silence) is a tone poem with a voice in it. Alphons Diepenbrock wrote it in 1905 for baritone and orchestra, and the first performance was given in Amsterdam on 20 May 1906 by the Concertgebouw Orchestra under Willem Mengelberg. The singer was the baritone Gerard Zalsman. According to the preface to the published study score, the piece was so well received that it was played twice that evening, before and after the interval.

The text is prose, not verse. It is section 423, in the fifth book, of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Morgenröte (Daybreak, or The Dawn of Day), and it describes a walker who has left the town and reached the sea at dusk. The bells are ringing the Ave Maria; then they fall silent, and so does everything else. The sea lies pale and gleaming and cannot speak. The sky glows in its mute evening colours, red, yellow and green, and cannot speak either. Faced with this enormous muteness, the speaker begins to distrust speech and even thought, and to feel his own heart swell with the silence. The Berliner Philharmoniker describe the piece as a person standing by the sea and reflecting on the limits of language and thought.

Diepenbrock was an unlikely composer. He was a classical scholar with a doctorate on Seneca, taught himself to compose and earned his living as a tutor of Latin and Greek. He was drawn again and again to Nietzsche, and to texts about night. He was also a devout Catholic, which shows in what he does with Nietzsche’s text: in the orchestra he quotes the plainchant hymn “Ave maris stella” (Hail, star of the sea), first in an interlude and again at the close.

The concert places the piece after a song by Mahler for a reason. The two men became friends in these years. The American radio programme Composers Datebook has said that this score sounds a little like a lost movement from a big Mahler symphony. The study-score preface adds that Diepenbrock shortened the work by about a third in 1911 and, in 1918, made the orchestration more transparent, with Debussy’s influence audible in the result.

What to Listen For

The preface describes three sections. In the first the walker arrives at the shore and leaves behind the restless noise of the town, above all its bells. The second begins with the image of the sea itself: “The sea lies there pale and shining, it cannot speak.” Diepenbrock called the piece a tone poem for orchestra and baritone, in that order, and a good deal of the telling is left to the instruments.

An orchestral interlude leads to the third section, and here the chant melody of “Ave maris stella” appears for the first time. The baritone’s last lines, as the silence deepens and his heart swells once more, are followed by the chant once more, now at full strength, and it is the orchestra that has the last word.