Composer’s Note:

In a reality in which the Holocaust, the Second World War, and the Atomic Bomb have all occurred, how is it possible that we can still sing? I believe that we can sing, and must sing, because music transcends linguistic barriers, it connects people from different parts of the globe, it can diffuse tensions and bring people together, it can create a safe, sacred, yet non-secular space in which we may grapple with life’s unanswerable questions. The noble, humane sentiments invoked by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, created to touch people’s souls and to call them to their better natures, inspired me to fill the space that it creates with the music that I hear when I first read it. I did it because singers—so vulnerable, so relatable, so human—inhabit that space, imbuing, through the act of singing itself, human language with a persistent, ineluctable persuasiveness. Everyone, Everywhere is a father’s message to his children, a citizen’s message to his community, and an artist’s cry of the soul inspired by a document that has acquired an arguably unmatched moral and political significance. This is our time: I offer this composition now, and in celebration of the 75th anniversary of what Amnesty International calls a “global roadmap to freedom and equality,” to add my voice to those singing out for justice and peace.

Conductor’s Note:

As the Covid pandemic was ebbing, I got a phone call from Daron Hagen, a composer I deeply admire. Daron and I had worked together in 2018 on the premiere of his A Walt Whitman Requiem (a tremendous piece I lucked into discovering the old-fashioned way, reading through a box of perusal scores sent by its publisher). It turned out Daron remembered our Requiem experience as warmly as I did, and wanted to explore a new collaboration. He was thinking about Eleanor Roosevelt.

This was serendipitous. I was seeking to develop a project for The Cecilia Chorus of New York in 2023, to commemorate in music the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Eleanor Roosevelt chaired UDHR’s drafting committee and is credited with shepherding the charter to its completion and adoption in 1948, in the aftermath of World War Two.

In a classic bit of New York synchronicity, Eleanor’s great biographer, Dr. Blanche Wiesen Cook, has been my downstairs neighbor for decades, amicably tuning out the high C’s of sopranos in my coaching studio. I reached out (down) to Blanche, who generously agreed to consult with Daron on a libretto. 

We approached the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and were honored to be told that High Commissioner Volker Türk would endorse our project. He offered to contribute ideas for the libretto and write a program note as well as introduce the evening from the stage of Carnegie Hall, where we would be giving the new cantata’s premiere. Michèle Taylor, US Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the UN Human Rights Council, also lent her support and affirmed her willingness to make spoken remarks. The premiere took place as planned on December 16, 2023, with both dignitaries addressing the audience.

Daron had the difficult assignment to fashion a libretto interleaving articles from the Declaration with quotes from human rights luminaries throughout history.  It can’t have been easy to devise a dramatically compelling text, but Daron managed it brilliantly.  Then it must have been even more challenging to come up with music that would sound so inexhaustibly vital and fresh (even though the UDHR’s poetic language casts a powerful spell). 

Daron’s monumental achievement is a five-movement, nearly hourlong cycle, on the sweeping scale of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis or Britten’s War Requiem. Its opening fanfare is a burst of optimism and energy, mirroring the exaltation of UDHR’s drafters as they pressed for a “new awakening.”  Syncopation, rising intervals, short motives and fast flourishes convey breathless excitement.  Chorus, children’s chorus, and soloists – singing in the six official languages of the United Nations – dart in and out of the texture, evoking the hubbub of collective enterprise. 

As the libretto progresses to Article One, a brief moment of stillness raises the curtain on a lilting treatment of that article’s immortal words (“all human beings”). Earlier material then undergoes further development before orchestra, chorus and soloists converge on an urgent sotto voce reminder of what is fundamentally at stake (“in order that freedom.”)  A hymnlike interpolation introduces Article Three, after which chorus and soloists pick up the music of Article One, now elaborated contrapuntally, including a sophisticated metric technique in which different voices sing the same melody notes simultaneously, but at different speeds.

The plaintive trumpet that opens Movement Two heralds an aching, pungently harmonized chorale (“equality”). Lovely pastoral episodes follow, with the soloists (“life without liberty”) and chorus (“everyone will finally”) unfolding buoyant melodies over a glitter of short notes in strings and winds. A striking shift in mood ushers in Article Four, with a suspenseful motive in the violins interrupted by fiercely explosive choral declamations (“no one”). The sequence of events is repeated to engage with Article Five before the movement builds to a soaring climax (“everybody”), culminating in a soul-stirring unison anthem reminiscent of Verdi (“equality is the soul.”)

Movement Three centers the children. Their spectral rhapsodizing (on the single phrase “everyone, everywhere”), disquieted by turbulent wind figures, is punctuated three times by spoken choral gusts in which adults murmur the phrase “human rights” in multiple languages. 

Movement Four is scaffolded on a repeating (though varied) sequence of eight chords, over which the chorus delivers a hushed assertion (“I am a person”) to a peacably swaying accompaniment of arpeggiating violins. The accompaniment becomes agitated as the libretto identifies personhood with political power (“the vote is sacred”).  Following Article Six, sopranos and altos give voice to a reflection of Eleanor’s (“we must wipe out”) over a countermelody in cello and clarinet that will take the foreground later in the movement (“we go ahead”).  Softness of dynamic and lowness of vocal register convey inner urgency.  The movement closes with a potent interplay of children’s chorus (“I am a person”) and baritone solo (“Vote!”).

The fifth and final movement begins in a seething vortex of revolution, the earlier communal murmur (“human rights” in multiple languages) now crescendoing to a fortissimo cry for justice. The exuberant dance music that follows (“if there is no struggle”) is an infectiously joyful enactment of sultry physical defiance to drab oppression.  After revisiting and reintegrating earlier material, the cantata closes tenderly, gently underlining the timeless message each of us is meant to heed and work toward (“where after all”). 

—Mark Shapiro