Pēteris Vasks

The Fruit of Silence

Mother Teresa liked to surprise people she met by giving them a small card printed with five concise sentences instead of a calling card. The brief text on the card beginning with the line 'The fruit of silence is prayer'' was a summary of her vision of devout, peace-promoting philanthropy in poetical form. In 2013, I created a musical setting of Mother Teresa's 'Prayer of Peace'' which was commissioned by the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival for mixed choir a cappella (C 55851) in the form of a densely woven elegiac sound stream. Slightly later, I extended the work to produce a version with piano (C 56345) which in turn became the basis for a setting scored for mixed choir with string orchestra which was first performed in Riga in October 2014. In 2015, the versions for piano quintet (ED 22450) and string quartet (ED 22723) also permitted my musical setting of Mother Teresa's words to be performed without choir in two traditional genres of chamber music. The current published version for mixed choir and organ extends the work series through a further conventional scoring.