For Mrs Tomoyasu from 'Or Shall We Die?'

Chamber version - conductor's score and parts on hire

Forces or Category: Soprano solo & ensemble

Orchestration: fl, ob, cl, bn, hn, tpt, hp, string quintet, soprano

This aria for soprano and orchestra is taken from the oratorio Or Shall We Die?. Mrs Tomoyasu was a young woman in 1945 when her nine ...

For Mrs Tomoyasu from 'Or Shall We Die?'

Chamber version - conductor's score and parts on hire

Description

This aria for soprano and orchestra is taken from the oratorio Or Shall We Die?. Mrs Tomoyasu was a young woman in 1945 when her nine year-old daughter died in her arms at Hiroshima. Her words, taken almost verbatim by the librettist Ian McEwan, describe her terrible experience on the day that the atomic bomb was dropped. There is also a version for chamber orchestra.

Programme Notes:

The oratorio Or Shall We Die? was commissioned from Ian McEwan and Michael Berkeley by the London Symphony Orchestra Chorus. It was first performed in 1983, the year that Ronald Reagan declared that a nuclear conflict in Europe was not only thinkable but winnable; cruise missiles came to Britain; Heseltine was appointed by Thatcher to extinguish CND; Professions for World Disarmament and Development was formed at the suggestion of Fenner Brockway and MANA was formed as one of those professional peace groups.
This piece is the chamber version of the soprano aria in section five of the work which forms the heart of the oratorio.
Mrs Tomoyasu was a young woman in 1945 when her nine year-old daughter died in her arms after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. She told her story to Jonathan Dimbleby in his television film In Evidence: The Bomb, and her words changed by the librettist, Ian McEwan, only to make smoother rhythms were used directly in the text.
© Michael Berkeley
Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press

All night I searched for my daughter.
At dawn a neighbour told me
she had seen her by the river,
among the dead and dying.

I heard her voice calling Mother, Mother,
and I went towards the sound.
My child was completely burned.
The skin had come off her head,
leaving a knot of twisted hair.

My daughter said, Mother, you're late, so late,
please take me back. It hurts, it hurts.
Please take me home. But there were no homes,
no doctors, there was nothing I could do.

I covered up her naked body and held her
in my arms for seven hours.
Late at night she cried out again, Mother,
Mother, and put her arm around my neck,
her small cold arm.

I said, Please say Mother again,
But that was the last time.

For Mrs Tomoyasu from 'Or Shall We Die?'

Chamber version - conductor's score and parts on hire

Michael Berkeley

Composer Information

Michael Berkeley (b.1948)

Michael Berkeley was born in 1948. He studied composition, singing, and piano at the Royal Academy of Music but it was not until his late twenties, when he went to study with Richard Rodney Bennett, that Berkeley began to concentrate exclusively on composing. In 1977 he was awarded the Guinness Prize for Composition; two years later he was appointed Associate Composer to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Since then Michael's music has been played all over the globe and by some of the world's finest musicians. Most of Michael's significant orchestral work, much of his chamber music and his operas are available on CD as part of the Chandos Berkeley Edition. For ten years from 1995 Michael was artistic director of the Cheltenham International Festival of Music. He currently presents Radio 3's Private Passions, which won the Broadcasting Press Guild's Radio Programme of the Year Award in 1996, and is Chairman of the Governors of The Royal Ballet.

Michael Berkeley's website