Four Seasons

Description

Mezzo-soprano, Clarinet in Bb, Violin, Viola, Violoncello, Piano — I was thrilled to be asked to write a work for Sasha Cooke, David Shifrin, and the members of Opus One, all spectacular artists, and many of whom I have had the pleasure of working with before.xa0 The first order of business in writing a song cycle is, of course, finding the text.xa0 Having decided upon Edna St. Vincent Millay (whose poems I had wanted to set to music for years but somehow never got around to), I gathered a number of poems that seemed likely possibilities.xa0 Millay returns again and again in her poetry to themes of the passage of time, of life, and of romance.xa0 I knew that I wanted to set the well-known sonnet that begins “What lips my lips have kissed.”xa0 Once I noticed that several of the other poems I had chosen also made explicit mention of the four seasons, the final selection became easy. The cycle opens with a poem titled Spring, a horror-filled meditation on mortality provoked by the coming of spring.xa0 This leads without pause to a setting of the untitled third of eight Sonnets first published in 1922, concerning the transience of love.xa0 The third and fourth songs are musically contrasting settings of the same poem, The Death of Autumn, transitioning from feelings of anger and horror in the first setting to acceptance and resignation in the second.xa0 The fifth song is a setting of the sonnet beginning “What lips my lips have kissed,” a meditation on past loves.xa0 The cycle concludes with yet another untitled sonnet in which the poet carries the memory of a departed lover through the whole year.