Sickness unto Death for reciter, 2 pianos, 4 trumpets and 4 horns (1976)
Sickness unto Death composed to the words of the Danish philosopher and poet Søren Kierkegaard is, alongside Diario 87 written ten years later, the piece by Sikorski in which the composer’s pessimistic vision of the world is at its strongest. The music – focused, dense, dark, muted, as it were – is full of tension and intense expression.
Given the material used by the composer, the work does not stand out among other pieces written in that period. It comprises four not very complex sound qualities:
- chords repeated in a monotonous rhythm,
- long chord “patches” built of aperiodically repeated notes,
- short modules played as quickly as possible, with sharp expression full of energy, and
- long, heavy, step-like chords.
However, their combination and the way they are used create an extremely interesting and compact whole. The static nature of the composition does not imply monotony. It is balanced by dissonant qualities of the music, which constantly fuels a sense of anxiety in the listeners. Already at the very beginning of the work Sikorski uses an interesting device, as a result of which repeated phase-shifted chords seem to be a distant echo of the bells mentioned at the beginning of Kierkegaard’s text:
And, oh, when the bells stop tolling, the hourglass of time, when the noise of worldliness is silenced, and the restless or the ineffectual business comes to an end, when everything is still about you as it is in eternity – whether you were man or woman, rich or poor, dependent or independent, fortunate or unfortunate, whether you did bear the splendour of the crown in a lofty station, or did bear only the labour and heat of the day in an inconspicuous lot; whether your name shall be remembered as long as the world stands (and so was remembered as long as the world stood), or without a name you did cohere as nameless with the countless multitude; whether the glory which surrounded you surpassed all human description, or the judgment passed upon you was the most severe and dishonouring human judgement can pass – eternity asks of you and of every individual among these million millions only one question, whether you have lived in despair or not, whether you were in despair in such a way that you did not know you were in despair, or in such a way that you did hide this sickness in your inward parts as your gnawing secret, carry it under you heart as the fruit of a sinful love, or in such a way that you, a horror to others, did rave in despair. And if so, if you have lived in despair (whether for the rest you did win or lose), then for you all is lost, eternity knows you not, it never knew you, or (even more dreadful) it knows you as you are known, it puts you under arrest by yourself in despair.
Pessimism with regard to human beings, who are marked by despair and consumed by a whirl of pointless actions, seems to be expressed throughout the piece, despite the fact that the text does not appear until its very last sections, as if clarifying the music. Thus, most of the work becomes an introduction to a clear and emphatic presentation of a painful truth about humans. Pushing music to the background was very much intentional, for it is the words that are to be the main carrier of the message. Music, on the other hand, is to create increasing tension, which – as is usually the case with Sikorski – is enhanced by the meaning of the text and remains unreleased. The whole is carefully balanced and well-thought-out.
Not all critics liked Sickness unto Death. Olgierd Pisarenko, for instance, wrote after the premiere at the 1977 Warsaw Autumn in Ruch Muzyczny that:
[...] those few chords repeated ad nauseam and written for two pianos, trumpets and French horns had to suffice as far as music went and had to “create an atmosphere” around Kierkegaard’s evocative text. And an atmosphere they did create, quite well, in fact, a bit like an illustration to a radio programme. Kierkegaard, of course, did not need that at all, but nor was he hampered by it either.