This Too Shall Pass (2009)
20 minutes
A Song cycle for Soprano and Piano
1. Since I Lost You
2. Speak Ye Stones
3. My Prime of Youth
4. I Shall Know Why
Commissioned by The Firm New Music
First performance by Greta Bradman (soprano) and Leigh Harrold (piano) on July 27th, 2009 at Pilgrim Uniting Church, Adelaide, South Australia.
Texts by D.H. Lawrence, Goethe, Chidiock Tichbourne, and Emily Dickinson.
20 minutes
A Song cycle for Soprano and Piano
1. Since I Lost You
2. Speak Ye Stones
3. My Prime of Youth
4. I Shall Know Why
Commissioned by The Firm New Music
First performance by Greta Bradman (soprano) and Leigh Harrold (piano) on July 27th, 2009 at Pilgrim Uniting Church, Adelaide, South Australia.
Texts by D.H. Lawrence, Goethe, Chidiock Tichbourne, and Emily Dickinson.
In order for there to be resurrection, there must first be death. To begin to understand and take delight in love gained, one must first experience love lost. Beyond the light of day there will always be the darkness of the night.
I seem to find a simple, honest beauty in the melancholy; perhaps it is because the juxtaposition of light and dark, pain and ecstasy, love and loss seems altogether more real, more human. These four elegies (despite its lack of title, I feel the Dickinson poem to be just as elegiac as its preceding songs,) dive into the bittersweet symphony that is life, offering simultaneous consolation and cause for distress. Musically, I wish only to effectively paint the inherent beauty, devotion, sadness and fear of these poet’s words. The words of the psalmist conveys for me much of this struggle of paradox within our life journeys: Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will not be afraid… perhaps so, but I must still walk through the valley.
The title of this collection, ‘This Too Shall Pass’, came after the songs were composed. It is taken from an old Jewish folk story, which Abraham Lincoln referenced in a speech in 1859.
“It is said an eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him with the words, 'And this, too, shall pass away.' How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!”
© Anne Cawrse, 2009.
I seem to find a simple, honest beauty in the melancholy; perhaps it is because the juxtaposition of light and dark, pain and ecstasy, love and loss seems altogether more real, more human. These four elegies (despite its lack of title, I feel the Dickinson poem to be just as elegiac as its preceding songs,) dive into the bittersweet symphony that is life, offering simultaneous consolation and cause for distress. Musically, I wish only to effectively paint the inherent beauty, devotion, sadness and fear of these poet’s words. The words of the psalmist conveys for me much of this struggle of paradox within our life journeys: Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will not be afraid… perhaps so, but I must still walk through the valley.
The title of this collection, ‘This Too Shall Pass’, came after the songs were composed. It is taken from an old Jewish folk story, which Abraham Lincoln referenced in a speech in 1859.
“It is said an eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him with the words, 'And this, too, shall pass away.' How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!”
© Anne Cawrse, 2009.