Obituary, Frederic Rzewski (1938-2021)

The American composer and virtuoso pianist Frederic Rzewski, best known for his set of variations on the Chilean protest song The People United Will Never Be Defeated, has died aged 83.

Of Polish ancestry, Rzewski was born in Massachusetts in 1938 and was educated at Harvard and Princeton, with teachers including Walton Piston, Milton Babbitt and Randall Thompson; after graduation he spent time studying and performing in Italy, where he worked with Luigi Dallapiccola and became a founder-member of the contemporary music collective Musica Electronica Viva. Shortly after returning to the US in 1971 he composed one of his first major works, Coming Together: written in the immediate aftermath of the Attica Prison riot, it sets text from the letters of Sam Melville, who had been serving an eighteen-year sentence for bombing US government buildings in protest against the Vietnam War and who died in the uprising.

In 1975 Rzewski composed what would become his best-known work, a mighty set of variations on Sergio Ortega and Quilapayun’s protest-song ¡El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido! from 1970; written partly in response to the Pinochet coup two years earlier, the work was commissioned and premiered by Ursula Oppens (who went on to win a Grammy for her recording of it three years later), and features a number of extended techniques including whistling and slamming the lid of the piano as well as posing a host of more conventional technical challenges for the performer. Ralph van Raat, Christoph Hinterhuber, Marc-André Hamelin and Igor Levit are among those who’ve taken up the gauntlet on disc in recent years, with the latter recording the work alongside two cycles to which it’s frequently been compared: Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. (An ardent admirer of Rzewski’s music since his student days, Levit premiered the composer’s Ages - of which he is the dedicatee - at Wigmore Hall three years later). Rzewski himself recorded the piece several times, as well as performing it in the somewhat unorthodox setting of a Pittsburgh fish restaurant in 2015.

The variation form proved an enduring source of inspiration for Rzewski throughout his career, as did socio-political issues: his early North American Ballads also make use of protest songs, whilst the Antigone-Legend was written in opposition to US foreign policy in the mid-1980s, and his choral output includes works such as Stop the War!, Stop the Testing! (both 1995) and Ode to the Deserter (2013). Rzewski was also fond of writing speaking-parts for instrumentalists, as evinced in works such as Michael Bakunin, Rentier, Rubinstein in Berlin and Dear Diary (for piano), Lost and Found (for percussion), and Fortune (for four viola-players).

As well as committing much of his own music to disc, Rzewski also recorded piano works by Stockhausen, Cornelius Cardew, Henri Pousseur and Anthony Braxton, and his concert repertoire ranged from Beethoven to Boulez. Rzewski continued composing until very near the end of his life, with his final work The Naked Truth (completed earlier this year) receiving its world premiere just last week in Lyon. He died in Italy on 26th June following a cardiac arrest.

Frederic Rzewski - a selected discography