A Poet To His Beloved

Description

Flute, Tenor, Violin 1, Violin 2, Viola, Cello, Piano — This work was commissioned by Susan and Elihu Rose.xa0 It was written at the request of tenor Robert White, to whom it is dedicated.xa0 It was premiered at Alice Tully Hall on February 17, 1993 by Robert White, James Galway, the Lark Quartet and pianist Brian Zeger.xa0 It was actually Miss Alice Tully’s suggestion that some settings of Yeats would be “lovely” that prompted me to look at these poems.xa0 I was at once struck by their intense lyric beauty and decided immediately to use them for this work.xa0 The six poems were chosen from Yeats’ 1899 collection “The Wind Among the Reeds.”xa0 Dealing with unrequited love, these particular poems have hints of the mystic preoccupations which were to become more prominent in Yeats’ later work.Scored for an ensemble consisting of Flute, Piano and String Quartet, it was my intention that the beauty and clarity of the poetry should be matched by a directness of musical expression which would not overwhelm the poems.xa0 The instrumental writing makes no attempt at “tone painting” but rather provides a colorful but often austere psychological background to the tenor’s melodies which are at times almost folk-like in their simplicity.The work is unified as a cycle not only by its tonal structure, but also through harmonic and motivic elements that the individual songs share.