Prayers My Grandfather Wrote

 

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Liner Notes

When Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco was nine years old, his maternal grandfather, Nonno Senigaglia, suffered a heart attack while walking in the street on Sabbath evening. The composer later recalled that his grandfather asked to be brought to the synagogue, “where he prayed for the last time; and then, brought back to his home, he died peacefully a few hours later—a wonderful death.” Some time after his death, the family discovered a small notebook in which he had notated music for several prayers. Nearly sixty years later, his grandson, then living in Beverly Hills, California, arranged one of those musical prayers into a set of variations for organ as Prayers My Grandfather Wrote: Sei Prelude per organo sopra un tem di Bruto Senigaglia. In the 1962 foreword to the piece, Castelnuovo-Tedesco wrote, “Now the little book [of my grandfather’s prayers] is exactly one hundred years old; the first entry (a simple ‘tone row’ marked as a figured bass) is dated 1862. And, now a grandfather myself, I have taken some of grandfather’s simple themes, developing them into a series of short preludes for organ.”

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Credits

Composer: Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco

Performers: Barbara Harbach, Organ

Additional Credits:

Publisher: Theodore Presser & Edizioni Musicali Berben
Organ: The Calvary Grand Organ, 5-manual 205-rank Moüller pipe organ