"Requiem - Full Score" Sheet Music by Harald Weiss

On letting go(Concerning the selection of the texts) In the selection of the texts, I have allowed myself to be motivated and inspired by the concept of “letting go”. This appears to me to be one of the essential aspects of dying, but also of life itself. We humans cling far too strongly to successful achievements, whether they have to do with material or ideal values, or relationships of all kinds. We cannot and do not want to let go, almost as if our life depended on it. As we will have to practise the art of letting go at the latest during our hour of death, perhaps we could already make a start on this while we are still alive. Tagore describes this farewell with very simple but strikingly vivid imagery: “I will return the key of my door”. I have set this text for tenor solo. Here I imagine, and have correspondingly noted in a certain passage of the score, that the protagonist finds himself as though “in an ocean” of voices in which he is however not drowning, but immersing himself in complete relaxation. The phenomenon of letting go is described even more simply and tersely in Psalm 90, verse 12: “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom”. This cannot be expressed more plainly.I have begun the requiem with a solo boy’s voice singing the beginning of this psalm on a single note, the note A. This in effect says it all. The work comes full circle at the culmination with a repeat of the psalm which subsequently leads into a resplendent “lux aeterna”. The intermediate texts of the Requiem which highlight the phenomenon of letting go in the widest spectrum of colours originate on the one hand from the Latin liturgy of the Messa da Requiem (In Paradisum, Libera me, Requiem aeternam, Mors stupebit) and on the other hand from poems by Joseph von Eichendorff, Hermann Hesse, Rabindranath Tagore and Rainer Maria Rilke.All texts have a distinctive positive element in common and view death as being an organic process within the great system of