Eriks Ešenvalds

This fall, we plan to premier a new mass setting by the Latvian composer, Eriks Ešenvalds on All Saints’ Sunday, November 7, a commission by Corky Gabbert and the Friends of Music.

By way of building some anticipation for this event, and for the First Sunday Music sequence more broadly, I hope to share a few examples of Ešenvalds’ work, available on YouTube.

One short piece which has affected me greatly comes from Ešenvalds’ opera The Immured, a work which I experienced at its premier in Riga some years ago. This opera’s sprawling storyline and nuanced libretto--by the poet Inese Zandere--can seem a bit perplexing to English speakers, but one eventually discerns a larger theme.

In the story, the building of a modern library becomes the occasion to reference a European folkloric trope: if something new and great is to be built, something precious must be sacrificed to bring it about. The folktales following this trope often involve a grisly sacrifice, sometimes an immuring in a wall of the new construction, and the opera explores this trope obliquely in a dream sequence.

Later, the trope translates into the main storyline when the Librarian loses her unborn child in a tragic accident. At the end of the opera, the Librarian explores her grief and sense of loss in a hauntingly beautiful aria, the “Librarian’s Song.” By means of this literary device, the folktale and the opera’s story thus become parables for modern contemplation.

I hope you enjoy this aria.

Dr Justin Appel, Director of Music

“Librarian's Song” from The Immured, Eriks Ešenvalds: