Golijov commanded international attention in 2000 with the premiere of his St. Mark Passion, commissioned in honor of the 250th anniversary of J. S. Bach’s death. He had steadily been winning over influential musicians, beginning with the St. Lawrence String Quartet, which premiered his Yiddishbbuk at Tanglewood in 1992, and he has enjoyed collaborations with such dynamic artists as the Kronos Quartet, Dawn Upshaw, Yo-Yo Ma, Gypsy band Taraf de Haidouks, Mexican rock band Cafe Tacuba, tablas virtuoso Zakir Hussain, and legendary Argentine musician and producer Gustavo Santaolalla. His music typically combines his Argentine and Eastern European Jewish musical heritages with Western art music.

Highlights of Golijov’s career include his groundbreaking chamber opera Ainadamar, based on the life of Federico García Lorca and featuring Dawn Upshaw, which premiered to great acclaim in 2003, the same year Golijov received the coveted MacArthur “genius grant.” The Metropolitan Opera just presented a critically acclaimed new production of Ainadamar in the fall of 2024, coproduced by Detroit Opera, Opera Ventures, Scottish Opera, and Welsh National Opera. Golijov’s recent works include The Given Note, a violin concerto for Johnny Gandelsman and The Knights, and the soundtrack for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2024 and which premiered in suite form by the Chicago Symphony the following fall.

Golijov has held numerous residencies with major orchestras and in the 2012–13 season held the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall. Since 1991 he has taught at the College of the Holy Cross, where he is Loyola Professor of Music.

“I wrote Tenebrae,” explained the composer, “as a consequence of witnessing two contrasting realities in a short period of time in September 2000. I was in Israel at the start of the new wave of violence that is still continuing today, and a week later I took my son to the new planetarium in New York, where we could see the Earth as a beautiful blue dot in space. I wanted to write a piece that could be listened to from different perspectives. That is, if one chooses to listen to it ‘from afar,’ the music would probably offer a ‘beautiful’ surface but, from a metaphorically closer distance, one could hear that, beneath that surface, the music is full of pain.

“I lifted some of the haunting melismas from Couperin’s Troisieme leçon de tenebrae, using them as sources for loops, and wrote new interludes between them, always within a pulsating, vibrating, aerial texture. The compositional challenge was to write music that would sound as an orbiting spaceship that never touches ground. After finishing the composition, I realized that Tenebrae could be heard as the slow, quiet reading of an illuminated medieval manuscript in which the appearances of the voice singing the letters of the Hebrew alphabet (from Yod to Nun, as in Couperin) signal the beginning of new chapters, leading to the ending section, built around a single, repeated word: Jerusalem.”

—©Jane Vial Jaffe