related works
Carve the Runes : for cello / Rens Tienstra
Genre:
Chamber music
Subgenre:
Cello
Scoring:
vc
Elegia : for viola, 2002 / Willem Jeths
Genre:
Chamber music
Subgenre:
Viola
Scoring:
vla
Tears : for viola / Rens Tienstra
Genre:
Chamber music
Subgenre:
Viola
Scoring:
vla
Sonate : altviool solo, 1948 / Wim Franken
Genre:
Chamber music
Subgenre:
Viola
Scoring:
vla
composition
Pleurants (Meditations on the Dijon Mourners) : for viola / Rens Tienstra
Other authors:
Tienstra, Rens
(Composer)
Description:
Pleurants (‘weepers’) are anonymous sculpted figures representing mourners, used to decorate elaborate tomb monuments, mostly in the late Middle Ages in Western Europe. On the Continent they are especially a feature of the tombs of Franco-Burgundian royalty, imitated by some grand nobles.
The inspiration for the current piece for viola solo came from one group of pleurants in particular: the so-called ‘Mourners of Dijon’. These mourners, part of an iconographical tradition led by the Haarlem-born artist Claus Sluter, stand sixteen inches high and originally occupied niches around the tombs of Philip the Bold, his son John the Fearless, and John's wife, Margaret of Bavaria. Their original location was Champmol, the Carthusian monastery in Dijon. There are statues of priests, monks, members of the ducal household, choirboys – all demonstrating their grief and pain most eloquently, some with eyes turned toward the heavens, others wiping their tears on their sleeves, some enveloped entirely in drapery. The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga described the tomb as the “most profound expression of mourning known in art, a funeral march in stone.”
The current piece for viola solo – an instrument reserved by many composers for their most elegiac expressions – sets this funeral march in motion, passing different participants that each keep the same plaintive song going in their own particular manner.
Rens Tienstra