Five Songs After Dimitar Peshev (2026) for soprano, violin, cello, and piano - 7'
-Commissioned by the Off the Beaten Path Music Festival and the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival
-Premiered in Bulgaria on August 1, 2026 at the Off the Beaten Path Music Festival and in the US on August 28th, 2026

Program Listing

Five Songs After Dimitar Peshev (2026)

I. Mercy
II. Veiled Glory
III. We Believe
IV. Blessed are We
V. Grant us Peace

Program Notes

Dimitar Peshev is a figure from Bulgarian history whose name is far less widely known than his sacrifice deserves. He represents something of the best in us, and it is no coincidence that his words and actions inspired this song cycle. We live in a time of renewed tribalism, when speaking on behalf of those outside one's own community demands a vanishingly rare kind of empathy—one that is neither self-serving nor without consequence.

During the Second World War, Nazi Germany pressured its allies–including Bulgaria–to deport their Jewish populations. In 1943, Bulgarian authorities deported more than 11,000 Jews from Bulgarian-occupied territories, and nearly all were murdered. The government then prepared to deport another 50,000 Jewish citizens living within Bulgaria's prewar borders.

Dimitar Peshev, then Deputy Speaker of the Bulgarian National Assembly, could not abide this. Knowing–as everyone did–the fate awaiting those deported, he drafted what is now a famous letter to the Prime Minister, persuading forty-two fellow members of parliament to sign it. As a result, Peshev lost his political position, but his intervention became a catalyst in the broader resistance that ultimately prevented the deportation of Bulgaria's Jewish citizens.

After the war Peshev was arrested by the new communist regime and tried as a member of the former government. Many of the Jews whose lives he had helped save petitioned on his behalf, almost certainly sparing him a harsher sentence. Eventually released, he was stripped of rank and property and lived the remainder of his life in poverty. In the year of his death in 1973, Yad Vashem recognized him as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.

The texts of these songs grow directly from the rhetoric, structure, and language of Peshev's letter. His invocation of an "enormous historical responsibility," his warning against demands that are "unbearable," and his condemnation of "exceptional" and "cruel measures" became part of the cycle's vocabulary. Above all, one phrase stayed with me: "just as air is necessary for life". Peshev argues that so too is justice necessary to the honor and dignity of government.

The piece also draws on religious texts. Its five movements function as analogues to the traditional Mass. Although Peshev belonged to an Eastern Orthodox world, the Mass provides the work's dramatic architecture, leading from mercy, to forsaken glory, to conviction, to shared humanity, and finally to peace. And the text weaves together imagery shared across other traditions: the lion of Bulgarian identity, biblical Israel, and Christian metaphor; the Hebrew evening prayer Hashkiveinu that closes the piece; and even a trace of Shakespeare. In form, the work’s principal model is Shostakovich's Seven Romances on Poems by Alexander Blok, a song cycle of the same instrumentation.

For many reasons, it was important to me to set the piece in Bulgarian, despite my speaking almost none of the language beyond the earnest but perhaps misguided declaration, "Аз говоря български добре" ("I speak Bulgarian well"). One of my teachers, Ned Rorem, often said that composers should only set languages they know near-fluently, and it is excellent advice that I have knowingly ignored. Fortunately, the Bulgarian pianist Lora Tchekoratova not only helped with translation, but spoke and recorded the entire text for me, so that I could know its rhythm, inflection, and accent before writing a single note.

Five Songs after Dimitar Peshev was commissioned by a consortium of festivals: Lora’s Off the Beaten Path in Kovachevitsa Bulgaria and the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival in Vermont, where I have been fortunate to serve as composer-in-residence for nearly two decades. The work is offered to its listeners with gratitude for the opportunity to revisit a life of extraordinary principle, and perhaps, to let one of history's unsung heroes sing again.