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Program Note
A little over a century ago William Butler Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” during the 1918-19 flu pandemic (when his wife, Georgie, caught the virus while pregnant and almost died). Around the same time young Wilfred Owen wrote “Anthem for Doomed Youth” reflecting on the tragedy of war, something he experienced firsthand from a foxhole (where he ultimately died just before World War I’s end).
In their poems, Yeats wrote of things falling apart, of losing hope, and Owen reported on what happens when hope gets lost and is replaced by a monstrous anger that darkens the future. The metaphor of these poems makes real now the feeling of another time, and may illuminate our understanding of the present. “Dona nobis pacem” is a phrase from the Latin mass meaning “Grant us peace.” It is a communal ask (or demand) for peace that is centuries old. Undoubtedly the desire for peace (from internal suffering and the wars it can provoke) is fundamental to the human condition. I have gathered these three texts together as lyric for music to tell an abstract story. That story begins with the loss of hope, continues with the grief and anger that ensues from that loss, and returns to a yearning for hope again. Many stories have a narrator–mine is Abraham Joshua Heschel, a 20th-century Jewish philosopher and peace activist (whose work my friend Rabbi Carolyn Braun only recently introduced me to). In Peace Cantata I use Heschel’s words to reflect and comment on the other texts. The cantata’s story, being set in an unspecified time, is one that begins and ends in the middle.
Peace Cantata is dedicated to Rabbi Carolyn Braun to honor her and celebrate her almost 30 years of service to Temple Beth El , Portland, Maine.
– Howard Frazin (2024)