The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind

As he describes below, Golijov’s intention in this piece is
to fuse thematic elements of the Jewish klezmer tradition with the form of the
string quartet as found in Brahms and Mozart. The clarinettist takes on the
role of roaring biblical prophet in the savage, uncanny sonorities of the
Aramaic Prelude and first movement, playing B flat, A and bass clarinets. In
the second movement, a Yiddish klezmer dance like no other is created using the
C-clarinet while the quartet pumps and stomps for dear life. The third section
takes on the aspect of a Hebrew prayer with the bass-clarinet prominent,
leading to something like a rabbinical blessing at the end. All this demands
extraordinary concentration and physical effort from the clarinet player, who
is required to maintain a controlled fusion of styles on four different
instruments, while leading the klezmer band in an explosive performance of this
remarkable score, which is played without a break.

Golijov himself describes his work in more temperate tones: Eight centuries ago Isaac The Blind, the
great kabbalist rabbi of Provence,
dictated a manuscript in which he asserted that all things and events in the
universe are the product of combinations of the Hebrew alphabet’s letters. Isaac’s
lifelong devotion to his art is as striking as that of string quartets and
klezmer musicians. In their search for something that arises from tangible
elements but transcends them, they are all reaching a state of communion. If
communion is not the reason, how else would one explain the strange life that
Isaac led, or the decades during which groups of four souls dissolve their
individuality into single, higher organisms, called string quartets? How would
one explain the chain of klezmer generations that, while blessing births,
weddings, and burials, were trying to discover the melody that could be set
free from itself and become only air, spirit, ruakh?

But blindness is as important in this work as dreaming and praying. I had
always the intuition that, in order to achieve the highest possible intensity
in a performance, musicians should play, metaphorically speaking, ‘blind’. That
is why, I think, all legendary bards in cultures around the world, starting
with Homer, are said to be blind. ‘Blindness’ is probably the secret of great
string quartets, those who don’t need their eyes to communicate among them,
with the music, or the audience. My hommage to all of them and Isaac of Provence is this work
for blind musicians, so they can play it by heart. Blindness, then, reminded me
of how to compose music as it was in the beginning: An art that springs from
and relies on our ability to sing and hear, with the power to build castles of
sound in our memories.