4 - The Requiem and its reception

Summary

Two years after the death of Hayasaka, Takemitsu himself was obliged to take to his sickbed, and it was in this incapacitated state that he worked on a commission he had received from the Tōkyō Symphony Orchestra, sometimes managing to complete only a single bar, or even half a bar, during the course of a day. The work that eventually emerged from these painstaking efforts, Requiem for Strings, received its first performance in June 1957, and the composer's comments at the time certainly gave the impression that this intensely elegiac work was intended as a memorial to his departed mentor: while Takemitsu claimed he had not written the piece ‘grieving over the death of any specific person’, as he was writing it he ‘gradually came to think about Fumio Hayasaka, and mourn his passing’.

In subsequent years, however, Takemitsu was to give a slightly fuller account of the Requiem's genesis, and hint at the presence of a second possible dedicatee. In one of his many conversations with Takashi Tachibana, for instance, he observed that ‘at that time especially I was seriously ill, and since I finally realised that I didn't know when I myself was going to die, I ended up thinking that one way or another I'd like to create one piece before my death … I thought I ought to write my own requiem’. This later version of events, in which the composer himself becomes the object of déploration, is corroborated by remarks made by Takemitsu in other contexts.