Apocalypse of the 5th Seal, Op. 7 (1951)

Description:

The Overture to Apocalypse of the 5th Seal is a musical interpretation of the eponymous painting by Dominikos Theotokopoulos (El Greco). In the foreground to the left, the immense figure of the apocalyptic John, clad in a red robe, kneels, crying out and gesturing with his hands raised to the sky. In the background, arranged in a semicircle, are the seven figures of the resurrected martyrs rising from the earth. In a supreme plea, they ask God to send them white robes to cover their nakedness and to avenge their unjust deaths for His Word: “…And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held: And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth? And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellow servants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled” (Revelation VI, 9-12). Above, to the right, a small winged angel brings the martyrs their white robes. A dark background surrounds the whole scene.

The music here – aside from a central melody that runs through the piece like an axis and symbolises the profoundly significant figure of John – is not a depiction of Theotokopoulos’s painting. Works such as this live more by what they symbolise through the ages than by what they precisely depict. Thus, I sought merely to extend the feeling of this despair, this tragic protest that springs from the tense figures, crafted, it seems, – like our times – with blood and fire. Only the two small female figures in the centre, with their incredible serenity, and the winged angel above to the right, provide here and there in the work the faint glimmer of some future redemption. And in the end, the bitter anticipation always remains.

-This is a near-verbatim translation of Sicilianos’s Greek text. The editor of On Music Elly Yotopoulou-Sicilianou excluded this programme note from the final publication but gave the manuscript to Anastasios R. A. Mavroudis.