About this Piece

Before spring 2020, the notion of an empty New York City could only have been considered science-fiction fantasy. But as a mysterious, highly transmissible virus began sowing its seeds across the United States, the city’s streets, usually flooded with people and bumper-to-bumper traffic, were hollowed out, its residents surrounded by an unsettling sea of silence punctuated only by the shrieks of ambulance sirens.

How to avoid infection and how best to care for those suffering the virus’ violent attack were riddles lacking solutions. Isolation ran rampant as social distancing and lockdown orders forced everyone inside. And as time went by and more families faced the reality of newly empty chairs at their dinner tables, an emotional crisis took root: How do we mourn the deaths of loved ones when houses of worship are shuttered and the simple act of gathering together could prove fatal?

In that atmosphere of fear and loss, Matthias Pintscher composed the orchestral poem neharot from his home in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. For Pintscher, the act of composing served as refuge—a safe space to process the distress that characterized the pandemic’s early days. “There are no tears when you’re writing,” the German composer-conductor said in a 2017 interview. “Before or after, maybe, but not during. You’re searching.”

Pintscher would ultimately leverage that stoic, exploratory approach to composition to create a musical channel for expressing communal grief. In his own words, neharot evokes “a clear echo of the devastation and fear, but also the hope for light, that so emotionally characterized this time in our lives,” its journey from grief to a place of hope and renewal serving as “a tombeau, a requiem, a kaddish for all the people we have lost.”

Just as the Hebrew term neharot carries two meanings—“tears” and “rivers”—Pintscher’s piece provides dual pathways for experiencing this music. In the former sense, we’re offered a canvas on which we can project our individual sorrows, the many tears shed as we processed overwhelming loss and upheaval. And in the latter sense, neharot invites us to turn to history for hope—specifically the story of Chartres Cathedral in northwestern France. 

A site of communion and congregation built atop the convergence of seven rivers, the cathedral has repeatedly been destroyed by fire and acts of war throughout its nearly 900-year history. And each time it was rebuilt as a symbol of resilience. “I see the image of a river as something eternal, the water always flowing,” Pintscher shared in an interview leading up to this week’s LA Phil performance of the work. “We come and go, the world falls apart and is patched together, but the water is always there as a symbol for eternity.”

Pintscher weaves those threads of dark and light, destruction and resurrection, throughout neharot. Following a violent opening fanfare, we begin to make out the ghostly soundscape that permeates the work: echoes of labored breathing in winds and brass, plucked strings that pulse like unstable heartbeats, and sustained, shadowy gestures that ebb and flow in the depths of the orchestra.

From that slow-moving swell of sound, individual voices emerge like beacons of light on a distant horizon. Solo passages for horn and oboe provide moments of solace in between the roar of the work’s seething climaxes, while a lone trumpet delivers its profound song of sorrow, a melody of heartache and grief delivered, in Pintscher’s words, “in the style of the mourner’s kaddish.” As the orchestral textures dissolve in the work’s closing moments, an eerie lament arises in the quiver of a solo thunderbolt—marked “distant, very expressive, in ecstasy” in the score—silenced by a final cry of anguish, jolting us out of our temporary reverie and back into sober reality. —Michael Cirigliano II

Composer's Note 

“Neharot” means rivers in Hebrew, but also tears. It also describes the tears of lamentation. This music was written during the worst time of many daily deaths in spring 2020 and is a clear echo of the devastation and fear, but also of the hope for light, that so emotionally characterized this time of our lives. Since the music evokes the river as a sonic phenomenon, it is also inspired by the mysteries of Chartres Cathedral, where several rivers cross exactly under the place where Chartres was built (and rebuilt after it was burned down, totally destroyed by fate and resurrected...thus a symbol for the emotional content of the music). I wanted to paint long arcs of sound with the music—whereby the two harps are used extensively as the source of the sound spectrum of the dark sound world of neharot. The piece is a tombeau, a requiem, a kaddish—for all the people we have lost in this unprecedented time. —Matthias Pintscher