Frederic Rzewski’s masterpiece, The People United Will Never Be Defeated, received its world premiere roughly 51 years ago at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, February 7, 1976. (Begging your indulgence, your author was “a bun in the oven” at the time, emerging just a few miles down the road and three months after the premiere.) Pianist Ursula Oppens, teacher of such Festival lifers as Winston Choi, commissioned the work as a companion to Beethoven’s monumental Diabelli Variations, Op. 120, which formed the first half of the KenCen program 51 years ago.
The music is unabashedly political. Rzewski makes use of not only the source material, a protest song by Sergio Ortega and the Chilean folk music group Quilapayún, but also music inspired by other resistance movements in Spain, Italy and Germany. Indeed, we cannot separate the text and context of the music from its impact. But from a purely musical context— what is sometimes termed “absolute music”— the piece is a tour de force requiring both a virtuoso pianist and a virtuoso audience. Clocking in a a lean hour, the piece winds its way through 36 variations, one variation for each measure of the original theme, which makes a final reappearance at the work’s conclusion.
To experience this music live is to experience change itself.
Artist: Conor Hanick, piano
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