Composed 2024; 23 minutes

Speaking of the two-viola string quintet tradition of Mozart and Brahms, where the inner voices deepen and darken the color and resonance of the ensemble, Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov says: “I totally understand what Mozart loved about this combination of instruments. I love its density.” Golijov explores this sound world in his new string quintet Tintype, moving between dreamlike recollection, lyrical meditation, and a more driven, motoric idiom. The three-movement quintet grew out of the soundtrack that the Rockport 2018 composer-in-residence wrote for Oren Rudavsky’s documentary Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire—a biographical portrait of the Nobel Peace Prize–winning author and advocate, cited as “a messenger to mankind.” The connection between Golijov’s music and Elie Wiesel’s lifelong wrestling with belief after the Holocaust becomes particularly close in the quintet’s final movement, Ani Ma’amin (“I believe”), a declaration of faith historically associated with victims on their way to death camps. Wiesel’s sense of memory as something easily damaged, partial, and urgently preserved sits directly behind Golijov’s piece and its title. The composer’s musical textures—especially the alternation between sparse fragments and driven motion—read as aural equivalents of a fragile, scratched, unevenly exposed tintype image.

The opening movement introduces Joseph Achron’s Hebrew Melody, Op. 33, a traditional Jewish liturgical theme made famous in multiple recordings and editions by Jascha Heifet—the earliest in 1917. The soulful theme emerges from shimmering, tremolando sonorities and eerie harmonics, coming in and out of focus throughout the movement. The solemn, darkly colored viola theme at the beginning of Elie dreams of his father draws on the slow movement of Franz Schubert’s late E-flat Piano Trio, D. 929, while its soaring central section echoes the slow movement of the Death and the Maiden quartet, D. 810. In the finale, Ani Ma’amin, Golijov does not narrate Wiesel’s history; instead, he distills it into fragments— chant-like lines, suspended textures, and sudden surges of motion that feel less like development than recollection. Some may also hear in the forward momentum the motion of the trains that took Wiesel to the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, with the interval of a falling fourth at times evoking a warning siren. Tintype offers not a continuous story but a series of imprints—memory held in place, marked by loss, erosion, and the passage of time.