Fifty years ago, Frederic Rzewski released 36 variations on the Chilean revolutionary song, “The People United Will Never Be Defeated.” Pianist and conductor Stephen Drury has been diving back into the work recently, posting variations on his Facebook page.
Now, for the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Rzewski’s work, Drury will be celebrating with a performance in Jordan Hall, along with works by Franz Liszt and Nikolai Roslavets. Drury joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to talk about the performance. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Arun Rath: I’m so excited to talk about this piece, “The People United Will Never Be Defeated.” This is a work that has lived with you for a long time. What I consider the reference recording of this, you made back in the early 90s. I’m curious, when did you first start to feel like this needed to be heard and that you needed to start playing it again?
Stephen Drury: Well, you’d think I’d learn another song after all these years. I heard Rzewski play it when it was pretty much brand new. It was written for [classical pianist] Ursula Oppens, and she premiered it, like you said, 50 years ago at what was then known as the Kennedy Center.
I heard Rzewski play it, I got the music and had a student study it with me. I said, “You know, I better get around to learning this myself.” The way the piece is put together, and what he does with it, just becomes more meaningful — not only musically, but socially? Politically, shall we say — the message of “The People United.”
Rath: It’s right there, Stephen. That’s revolutionary.
Drury: Yes, and he starts with that. I mean, the story of the original song written by Sergio Ortega, who was a classical music composer. He was walking home one day and heard the chant, “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido,” before the dictatorship in Chile. He had that rhythm in his ear, and he said, “I’m going to do something with this musically.”
He wrote what kind of turned into a folk song. It was popularized by the group Quilapayún, who did native Chilean folk/rock music, and turned it into this huge, huge social movement song. Rzewski takes it from there and turns it into this hour-long solo piano modern monolith, which ain’t as scary as it sounds.
First of all, it’s really listenable — I mean, you can follow it — and what’s interesting to me is the structure. It’s a set of 36 variations. He plays the theme, and he does five variations, five little fantasies on the theme, each in a very remarkable, noticeable, distinct or harmonic style, and then puts them together.
He’ll do four bars in the style of the first variation, four in the style of the second, four in the style of … and that’s variation number six. Then, he starts again, does five more styles, puts them together, number seven, number eight, number nine, you hear it. And you keep reflecting on what you’ve heard and this unity, and then, he gets to variation 31, which is the sixth set of the six. [That] takes a little bit from variation one — which is almost an hour ago at that point — a couple bars from variation seven, couple bars from 13… I have to count by sixes and then add one to each.
And then, of course, he gets to variation 36, which looks back to the previous six, which looks back to the previous hour of music. And there you have, in music, “The People United.”
Rath: I’m so curious, especially hearing you talk in this depth about the music… This music lives inside of you. I’ve seen clips of you playing on YouTube, and there’s no sheet music in front of you. It’s like this music has been inside you now for decades. I’m curious what it’s like inside your head. When there’s unrest in the world or things like this, are these melodies coming up inside your head?
Drury: I want to keep learning new music, and there’s so much stuff that I haven’t, for myself, learned as a pianist. But quite frankly, these days, what I have seen happening over the last several months, I don’t feel like I have a choice. I feel like the people have to be united.
We had the historian Heather Cox Richardson visit us at Tanglewood last summer, and I asked her, “You know, we’re just musicians here. What can we do other than play variations on the ‘People United’ one more cotton-picking time? And she said, “Well, you know what musicians can do is create a sense of community.” So that’s what I’m trying to do, I guess, with this concert. Just give us a chance to remember there’s more than just a few of us out there.
Rath: That’s a great transition to the other pieces you’ll be playing, both associated with Ukraine. The association may not be obvious to people in the piece by Franz Liszt; it’s the etude “Mazepa.” Can you tell us about that piece and the Ukrainian connection?
Drury: Well, it turns out that Mazepa was an early Ukrainian warrior. Liszt took his inspiration from the poem about Mazepa by Lord Byron, and when I first learned the etude, I didn’t know that. I also didn’t know that the very first piece on the program, which is very short, like two minutes long, by Nikolai Roslavets.
Roslavets is known as an early Russian modernist; turns out he’s of Ukrainian heritage, and he was shut down pretty brutally by Stalin. I’ve always loved Roslavets’s music, and I thought the two pieces would slide together nicely.
Rath: Tell us more about this piece. It’s called, “Poème.”
Drury: I have to say, it’s very pretty and quiet. You kind of feel the 20th century opening, but very gently.
Rath: I could use some gentleness right now.
Drury: Well, I thought I’d start that way before we get loud and ferocious with the Mazepa the Warrior King.
Rath: Ferocious, but triumphant — which, I would say, going with the whole theme of this program, is also something that I think we really need right now.
Drury: Yes, [from] the actual poem about Mazepa, at the very end of Liszt’s piece, he quotes Byron as saying, “Finally he falls, and he rises again.”
Rath: Tell us about how you decided to pull these pieces together for this program. What’s the story?
Drury: It’s hard to say there’s not really a narrative, just kind of a sonic evolution. And of course, Rzewski’s response — like any musician, any real composer, he responds to things that haven’t happened yet. Rzewski isn’t with us anymore. He was a Massachusetts boy; he was born in Westfield.
You know, the uniting of the people is an issue that’s always going to be with us, but so much more today. When he wrote it, it was in the aura of the bicentennial, and now, after 250 years, how much are we united?
