Milwaukee Opera Theatre performs new 'Requiem' for pandemic years

1 year ago 475

Paula Foley Tillen's new "Requiem" commemorates people lost during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it began as a more intimate memorial.

It starts and ends with traditional Christian texts, but also draws from Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu traditions, as well as contemporary poetry. It acknowledges the reality of death while defying it with a joyful alleluia.

Milwaukee Opera Theatre will premiere Tillen's "Requiem" Jan. 29 at Plymouth Church, 2717 E. Hampshire St. Soprano Lydia Rose Eiche, tenor Nathan Wesselowski, narrator Gladys Rhodes Chmiel and pianist Julie Fraleigh will perform with the choral group Chant Claire, conducted by Benjamin Bedroske.

As both a church musician and a performing artist, Tillen has been active in the Milwaukee music scene for decades. For the past 14 years, she's been music director of Southminster Presbyterian Church in Waukesha. While she has composed many hymns and arranged both liturgical and secular music, this "Requiem" is a step up in scale for her.

It began, simply and somberly enough, in 2017, when she learned of the unexpected death of Nick Chudnow, the son of her friends Dick Chudnow and Jennifer Rupp. Tillen said she is not someone who usually thinks about her creations being divinely inspired. But the day after she heard about Nick's death, "I sat down and cranked out a mourner's Kaddish" — her own musical setting for the traditional Jewish prayer in Aramaic.

Her Kaddish is part of this "Requiem." Like many older requiems, hers has eight movements, but she does not adhere to the traditional structure of the Catholic Mass. After opening with the Latin "Requiem aeternam" and "Kyrie, eleison!," her "Requiem" moves through a story from the Buddhist sage Thich Nhat Hanh; an excerpt from Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass"; poems from former Wisconsin poet laureate Ellen Kort, Merrit Malloy, John Donne and Malcolm Guite; a lyric from Rabindranath Tagore; her Kaddish; a Christian "Sanctus"; and a final benediction.

Only Guite's poem directly addresses the COVID-19 pandemic: "Each evening they announce the deadly toll / And patient voices calmly call the roll." But the siege of coronavirus both flavored her "Requiem" and gave Tillen the enforced isolation in which to compose it. Both her godmother and a beloved aunt died during that time.

Tillen didn't start out as a composer. She graduated from Carroll College, as it was known then, with a degree in piano performance. But in the course of playing six shows a week for more than a decade for the improvisatory ComedySportz, founded by Dick Chudnow, she gained enormous experience in creating music on the fly. Then she realized if she could do that, she could also create music and write it down.

New structures online such as Sheet Music Direct, founded by Milwaukee's Hal Leonard, have enabled Tillen to publish and sell some of her choral anthems and other arrangements. The sales sweet spot, she said, is music that might be accessible for and attractive to a decent high school choir.

While Tillen did not use any specific historical requiem as a role model for hers, she is fond of John Rutter's 1985 composition, noted for its beauty and simplicity. For the conclusion to her composition, she turned to familiar words from the funeral liturgy found in the Book of Common Worship: "All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia."