Sister Arts

The singers ask John the Baptist to free their lips for praise. Guido took the syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la from the beginnings of the prayer’s six half-lines. The final invocation, Sancte Ioannes, falls outside his six-note series.

Dryden’s poem begins with the creation of the universe, commanded into order by a voice from above. Handel set it in his Ode for St Cecilia’s Day, HWV 76, in 1739. Later stanzas name the trumpet and the flute, and the orchestra supplies the instruments the words name.

The first three lines of the text of the piece that begins on page 76 of the 1659 book under the heading “Lamento”. The table at the end gives “Parole dell’Illustrissimo Sig. Pietro Dolfino”. Dolfin was one of the Venetian noble amateurs whose verses Strozzi set. The punctuation is editorial.

The goatherd sleeps with his faithful dog beside him. Vivaldi gives the sleeper to the solo violin and the dog to the viola; the poem’s last three lines become the final pastoral dance. Letters printed beside the sonnet lead directly to the corresponding passages in the instrumental parts.

In Racine’s tragedy Phèdre recalls first seeing Hippolyte; she blushes, turns pale, loses her voice, freezes and burns. Pellegrin adapted the tragedy for Rameau as Hippolyte et Aricie and explained his changes in his 1733 preface. Gods could appear in an opera, and the lovers could be saved. Phèdre still had to face what she had done.

Luther’s paraphrase of Psalm 130 was the basis of Bach’s Cantata BWV 38 and of two organ settings in Clavier-⁠Übung III. BWV 686 is written in six parts, two of them played on the pedals. Luther’s tune runs through the six-part texture.

In Nicolai’s hymn, watchmen call the city awake at midnight. Bach set all three stanzas in Wachet auf, first performed in 1731. The sopranos carry the hymn in the opening movement; the tenors take the second stanza against an independent string melody. The words refer to the wise and foolish virgins in Matthew 25.

Timotheus has moved Alexander through a succession of passions by singing to him. Dryden then brings in Saint Cecilia, who draws an angel down with her music. Handel set the ode in 1736, in an adaptation by Newburgh Hamilton, and gave this final contest between musicians to the chorus.

Scarlatti addressed the preface to anyone prepared to sit down and play. The thirty pieces that follow demand considerable skill, and the preface ends ‘Vivi felice’, ‘Live happily’. Scarlatti wrote it for his first readers in London in 1738–⁠39. The Italian is transcribed in the Treccani account; spelling and capitalisation are normalised here.

In the Ninth Symphony Beethoven set Schiller’s words “All people become brothers” for soloists and chorus. Before the poem begins, the bass sings Beethoven’s own words, “O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!” (“O friends, not these sounds!”). The orchestra has already played the melody that the voices will take up.

Gellert published these devotional poems in 1757; Bach published his settings of the whole collection the following year. In Die Ehre Gottes aus der Natur, the keyboard keeps moving while the singer holds longer notes. Gellert received a copy from Bach in March 1758. Beethoven later set six Gellert poems in Op. 48.

In the passages that follow, Bach asked the player to become sad in sorrowful music and to change when the mood changed. He also defended appropriate facial expression, holding that to sit like a carved figure at the keyboard was no virtue.

Milton fills the earth with creatures, then pauses before introducing the human being who will govern them. Haydn’s The Creation makes the same pause before the tenor aria Mit Würd’ und Hoheit angetan. The English libretto Haydn brought home from London drew on Milton as well as Genesis and the Psalms; van Swieten reshaped it in German. Book VII, lines 499–⁠510.

In Goethe’s poem a violet wishes to be picked by a passing girl, who treads on it instead. Mozart set the poem on 8 June 1785 and added words of his own at the end: Das arme Veilchen! After a pause he repeats the words that called it a dear little flower. Köchel catalogue record.

Shortly before, the Count answered every plea for forgiveness with “No”. He then asked forgiveness himself. The Countess grants it, and Mozart has the whole company take up her music. Da Ponte gave her few words. Text: the 1786 Vienna libretto.

Writing to his brothers on 6 October 1802, Beethoven explained why he had withdrawn from people he wanted to be among. He recalled standing beside someone who could hear a distant flute while he heard nothing. The letter remained among his papers. Its opening asked those who called him hostile or misanthropic to reconsider.

Schiller’s 1785 ode originally made beggars the brothers of princes. In the revised stanza Beethoven set, all people become brothers. He chose and rearranged the verses for the Ninth, adding the bass soloist’s opening appeal, O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!, before Schiller’s words begin.

One singer takes both the child’s terrified lines and the father’s reassuring answers. In Schubert’s 1815 setting, D. 328, the piano plays repeated triplets beneath them. When the ride stops, the narrator states that the child in the father’s arms is dead.

In Müller’s poem the old man stands barefoot on the ice, his plate empty, while the village dogs growl. The first and last stanzas are shown here. Schubert’s piano part imitates the hurdy-gurdy, a string instrument sounded by turning a handle. The poem ends with questions that receive no answer.

Juliet hears a bird and insists it is the nightingale, because if it is the lark, Romeo must leave. Berlioz saw Smithson play Juliet at the Odéon in September 1827. His orchestral love scene is also set at night, with interrupted speech and a separation approaching. It does not set these lines.

Dido addresses the things Aeneas has left in her room. As a boy, Berlioz broke down while reading her death to his father; the doctor tactfully closed the book. In the final act of Les Troyens, her farewell to her city and memories comes before the Carthaginians’ public curse on Aeneas’s descendants.

In Eichendorff’s poem the walker hears a nightingale and distant rivers, and then his own singing sounds to him as strange as a voice in a dream. Hensel made this the opening song of Op. 7. The piano keeps moving beneath the repeated word stille (still).

Puck asks the audience to treat the evening’s confusions as a dream. Mendelssohn had known the play in German translation as a teenager. For the 1843 production he accompanied this farewell with the four wind chords from his 1826 overture.

Chopin set Witwicki’s Wiosna in 1838 and copied it into albums several times, sometimes as a piano piece. In the opening stanzas the singer is beside a grazing herd; later stanzas of the poem turn to sorrow. The song was published after his death as Op. 74 No. 2. Polish sung text.

Heine’s poem is a confession, and the beloved’s reply is not written. Schumann set it as the opening song of Dichterliebe in 1840. The piano begins before the singer and ends after him, and the song closes without the chord that would resolve it. 1827 text and scan.

Later in this essay, Hoffmann’s Kapellmeister Kreisler sits beside the piano after hearing Beethoven’s first Op. 70 Trio and writes down its effect on him. Hoffmann presented criticism as a scene in a story. Schumann took Kreisler’s name for his Op. 16, and in Hoffmann he had a model for writing in the voice of an invented musician. The Beethoven essay.

In Petrarch’s sonnet the lover burns and freezes, flies and lies on the ground. Liszt first set the poem for voice, then arranged it for piano, which takes over the long phrases and the bursts of agitation. His Sonnet 104 is Sonnet 134 in modern editions.

In Shakespeare, Macbeth hears of his wife’s death and answers with this speech. Verdi and Piave gave him a much shorter reply, in which life is an idiot’s story, wind and noise. His lament, Pietà, rispetto, amore, comes earlier, when he counts the pity, respect and love his old age will never receive.

Mathilde’s poem describes plants growing far from the countries they came from. Wagner was living in a cottage on her husband’s Zurich estate when he wrote the song. He marked it as a study for Tristan, and the Prelude to the third act takes up its music. These are the first two of six stanzas. In the complete German poem the greenhouse becomes a place of human exile.

On the morning after the street fight, Sachs sits with his book and tries to account for the neighbours’ behaviour. His word Wahn covers delusion, folly and madness. He resolves to put that unruly energy to work in the song contest, then helps Walther turn a dream into a song the judges can hear.

Clara included this setting in the Rückert volume she and Robert published in 1841, their first full year of marriage. Three times the speaker says ‘O nicht mich liebe’; in the fourth stanza ‘nicht’ becomes ‘ja’. Mahler set the poem in 1902 as a gift for Alma. German text and work identification.

A setting of the text for the dedication of a church, for four unaccompanied voices. Bruckner wrote Locus iste for Linz’s new cathedral in 1869, and it was first sung in the votive chapel that October. The choir’s C major chords give way to chromatic harmony in the middle section, and the music then returns to the opening words.

Eurydice is recalled to the underworld; Adonis dies of his wound; Achilles’ mother cannot save him. Brahms began this lament with a long oboe solo in D major, after which the choral voices enter in imitation. At the end he returned to Schiller’s penultimate line, which says that even to survive as a song of mourning is splendid. German text.

Brahms found the poem in his friend Albert Dietrich’s house in 1868 and began sketching during a visit to Wilhelmshaven. In the poem the gods live in light, and the mortals who appear later fall blindly into suffering. His setting moves from E♭ major into C minor. After the singers have finished, the orchestra plays the music of the opening again, in C major. He had thought of repeating the opening words instead; Hermann Levi talked him out of it.

Pushkin presents the letter as his translation of Tatyana’s French. In the opera she sings it herself, alone, through the night. Lavrovskaya suggested that Tchaikovsky set the novel; he went out to find a copy and stayed awake planning the scenes. Russian text of the letter.

Balakirev suggested Shakespeare’s lovers as a subject and went on urging revisions into 1871. The overture’s love theme is first played by cor anglais and muted violas, after the music of the feud.

The goblin is sewing boots for his wedding tomorrow. By the end of Erben’s ballad he has torn the head from his own child and thrown it onto the mother’s doorstep. Dvořák made the rhythm of this sewing refrain into the goblin’s recurring orchestral phrase, which returns when he comes for revenge. Erben’s text.

Pau-⁠Puk-⁠Keewis begins slowly, then spins until the dust rises in a whirlwind. Dvořák told the New York Herald on 15 December 1893 that this wedding feast suggested his Ninth Symphony’s scherzo. He had known Hiawatha in a Czech translation long before he crossed the Atlantic.

The censor removed this couplet from the tale’s first publication in 1835; Pushkin protested in his diary. Rimsky-⁠Korsakov and his librettist Vladimir Belsky later had their own dealings with the censors over the same story.

Mahler set these words for alto in the fourth movement of his Third Symphony. Strauss took chapter titles from the same book for Also sprach Zarathustra, composed in 1896; near its end, a bell strikes midnight. In Nietzsche’s text, the clock’s numbered strokes fall between the lines of the poem. They are omitted here.

In Newman’s poem the Angel lowers the soul into purgatory. These are the first two stanzas of the farewell; the last promises a return in the morning. Elgar gave the Angel to a mezzo-soprano, although Newman’s poem makes the Angel male, and has chorus and semi-chorus sing around the solo voice as the work closes in D major.

Murger’s preface offers his young artists three destinations, two of them places for the sick and the dead. Illica and Giacosa drew the opera from his stories and their stage adaptation. Mimì comes to the garret for the last time because she wants to be with Rodolfo.

The middle stanza is omitted here. Mahler set the poem in F major for voice and a reduced orchestra, with a cor anglais line that grows out of the vocal line. “That is myself,” he told Natalie Bauer-⁠Lechner in 1901. The Adagietto of the Fifth Symphony is in the same key.

Bethge’s Die chinesische Flöte (1907) gave Mahler loose German paraphrases of Tang poets — Li Bai, Wang Wei, Meng Haoran — already filtered through French and German translations. For the end of Der Abschied Mahler stopped adapting and wrote these lines himself.

After ten years in the mountains, Zarathustra addresses the sun and prepares to descend to other people. Strauss begins his response with the low C and trumpet call of sunrise. Later headings, including the dance and the convalescent, come from other chapters of Nietzsche’s book.

Hofmannsthal gave the Marschallin these words in Act I, when she is alone with Octavian, the young lover she knows she will lose. Strauss set them close to speech, with pauses filled by the orchestra. In the final trio she lets Octavian leave with Sophie.

The first of six stanzas, in the spelling of Aakjær’s collection Rugens Sange (1906). The poem is dated Jebjerg, 19 June 1905, and was first printed in Politiken on 26 June 1905. Nielsen set it in 1907 as No. 3 of the first volume of Strophic Songs, Op. 21, dedicated to Bodil Neergaard; the autograph is dated 25 June 1907. The song was published separately and sold very widely.

Pippa’s song from Pippa Passes. Beach set it as Op. 44 No. 1 and printed the text on the page opposite the music. She sets the first four lines, slows at “dew-pearled”, then starts again, drops “Morning’s at seven” and “The hillside’s dew-pearled”, and runs on to “All’s right with the world”.

In Poe’s poem the words “tinkle” and “bells” are repeated many times. Rachmaninoff used Balmont’s Russian adaptation, keeping the four stages from sleigh bells to funeral bells. The tenor begins the sleigh scene and the chorus answers him. Poe’s complete poem appeared in November 1849, after his death.

The first two of four stanzas. Rachmaninoff dedicated his A minor setting, Op. 4 No. 4, to Natalia Satina, his future wife. The piano introduces the melody before the singer asks for silence. It was published in 1893.

Verlaine’s Art poétique, collected in Jadis et naguère in 1884, asks for music first and is written in nine-syllable lines. The fourth stanza pairs a flute with a horn. In Clair de lune Fauré set this poet’s lines about masked dancers to a minuet; the piano keeps the minuet going under words that doubt the dancers’ happiness.

The first and last stanzas of the poem Saint-⁠Saëns set as a song in 1872 and then turned into Danse macabre. The solo violin plays Death’s fiddle, and an oboe plays the cock that ends the night.

Fauré set this poem in 1887 as Op. 46 No. 2. The piano starts the dance before the voice enters, then continues its own melody under the words. In Verlaine’s poem the revellers sing about happiness while scarcely believing in it, and the fountains sob.

These are the first lines of the faun’s monologue, in which he wants to keep the nymphs and cannot tell whether he dreamt them. Mallarmé heard Debussy’s Prélude on 23 December 1894, the day after its première, and wrote to him straight afterwards: “The marvel!”

Ondine taps on a man’s window, offers him her underwater kingdom and is rejected in favour of a mortal woman. She cries, laughs and turns into rain. Ravel printed Bertrand’s poem before the first movement of Gaspard de la nuit. Near the end of the movement the rapid water figuration stops briefly for an unaccompanied melodic line. The omitted paragraphs contain her invitation; the French follows the 1895 edition.

Ravel’s scenario includes a lighting cue: the chandeliers blaze at ff. The waltz begins much more quietly, with divided double basses and fragments in the bassoons. The dancers come into view gradually.

The voice enters on these lines in the fourth of the Siete canciones populares españolas, after a long piano introduction in 3/8. The second couplet is a farewell: “goodbye, my girl, until tomorrow”. María Barrientos sang the song with Falla at the piano in Paris in 1928.

At the opening of Clairières dans le ciel a girl gets her feet wet, goes back up the meadow and shakes herself, laughing. Boulanger chose thirteen poems from Jammes’s Tristesses; the final song returns to this meadow a year further on from the woman.

In the poem Don Pedro has four camels and the whole world, and the poet, in five lines, envies him. Poulenc set it as the opening song of Le Bestiaire. The traveller’s name extends across the verse, and the last line states how little equipment the speaker has.

Apollinaire opened Alcools (1913) on a Paris morning, with the Eiffel Tower as a shepherdess and the bridges bleating. The lines move from this pastoral image to a complaint about classical antiquity without a full stop, in the way Stravinsky cuts between orchestral groups. By the fourth line the cars are counted among the antiques as well.

Vaughan Williams chose these three passages from Meredith’s poem to preface the score. The solo violin plays trills and runs that stand for the skylark’s “silver chain of sound”.

Ives devoted the first movement of Concord and a long chapter of his accompanying essays to Emerson. These sentences from Self-⁠Reliance help explain the attraction. In the sonata, short phrases interrupt one another and return changed. The excerpt is prose.

In the prose chapter ‘Sounds’ in Walden, Thoreau wrote of hearing the train inside his woods and compared it with a hawk. In Concord, Ives referred both to the writer’s ear and to his flute-playing. Near the end of the last movement an optional flute enters above the piano’s repeating figure.

The poem turns moonlight into wine poured through the eyes. Hartleben made his own German poems from Giraud’s French rondels and kept their repeated lines. Schoenberg chose this one to open Pierrot lunaire; the words return, but their musical setting changes. These are the first two stanzas.

Webern set these fourteen lines in 1919 as the third song of Op. 14, for voice with clarinet, violin and cello. Trakl moves from the woods of home to a crumbling wall, then into the vineyard and the night. In the middle of the poem the people wander and sing; by its end they have become shadows and grieving eagles.

Baudelaire’s speaker calls to the beloved from a dark gulf. Berg set Stefan George’s German translation beneath the finale of the Lyric Suite, and wrote the words into the score he gave Hanna Fuchs-⁠Robettin. The quartet’s four players perform the movement without the words; in performances with a singer the concealed text is sung.

Natasha wakes Sonya because the moon is too beautiful to sleep through. Below them, the widowed Andrei overhears and begins to want a life again. Prokofiev and Mira Mendelson chose this episode, set at a bedroom window, for their opera’s first scene. The Russian text follows the Russian Virtual Library edition.

The first two stanzas in the public-domain text of Poems: Second Series (1891). Copland opened his Dickinson cycle with this poem, under its first line, Nature, the gentlest mother. The piano plays trills and fluttering figures for the birds in the poem.

Kovalyov finds his nose praying in the Kazan Cathedral, dressed as an official of higher rank. The nose looks at his buttons and tells him that there can be no connection between them, since they work in different departments. Shostakovich gave the owner a baritone voice and the escaped nose a tenor.

In Walden, Thoreau followed these words with an account of a morning spent in his doorway, from sunrise to noon, while birds sang around the house. Cage used another of his books, the Journal, for Empty Words (1974). Across its four parts he removed first sentences, then smaller units of language, until only letters and sounds were left for the voice.

The Quartet takes its images from Revelation 10: an angel clothed with a cloud, with a rainbow above his head and feet of fire. Messiaen gave two movements to the angel, including the seventh, the tangle of rainbows. The words are not sung in the Quartet.

Crabbe, who was born in Aldeburgh in 1754, sent Grimes back to the estuary after the deaths of his apprentices. There he is kept by the sluice and its dull, repeated sound. Britten read the poem in America while he was missing Suffolk. Slater’s libretto gave the fisherman long solo songs, which Crabbe had not given him. The spelling of these six lines is modernised.

In the opening movement of the War Requiem, the tenor sings this poem with the small chamber orchestra while the large choir is silent. Owen’s lines on guns and shells follow the funeral bells; then the choir returns with the Kyrie.

These words belong to the Communion of the Mass for the Dead, a section Ligeti had left out of his Requiem. He set them separately in 1966 for Clytus Gottwald’s Schola Cantorum Stuttgart. The sixteen parts overlap their syllables until Domine is heard in the bass voices, first in falsetto and later low down.

Mallarmé’s lace, empty bed and sleeping mandore (a small lute) supply the text for the central movement of Pli selon pli. Boulez set the sonnet for soprano and nine instrumentalists, including four percussionists. Maraca strokes return through the setting, and the fourteen lines expand into phrases whose pace can depend on the singer’s breath.

The lines that open Kafka-⁠Fragmente are about orderly walkers with dancers moving round them. The cycle returns repeatedly to feet, paths and difficult progress. Kurtág dedicated it to Marianne Stein, the psychologist who had helped him begin composing again in Paris. Three decades later she was still helping him with his work.

Hölderlin lived with the family of the Tübingen carpenter Ernst Zimmer from 1807 until his death in 1843; Zimmer preserved these lines in an 1812 letter to the poet’s mother. Kurtág set them in 1994 as the fourth song of Hölderlin-⁠Gesänge, Book I, Op. 35a. The song is for a single baritone, and the lines promise harmonies and peace.

The psalm opens with a cry from the depths, followed by a plea to be heard. Its Latin opening gives the title of Gubaidulina’s De profundis (1978), written for Friedrich Lips, a bayan player. The poem is Psalm 129 in the Vulgate and Psalm 130 in the Hebrew numbering.

Jordi Savall asked Pärt for this prayer for a peace concert. The alto sings the melody of the ninth-century antiphon, and Pärt wrote three new parts around it. Savall conducted the first performance in Barcelona in July 2004, at a concert dedicated to those killed in the Madrid train bombings that March.

Tehillim begins with these verses and continues through verse 5 of Psalm 19. A woman sings with drum and handclaps; the clarinet doubles her, then another voice follows in canon. Reich wrote the melody himself, letting the Hebrew words set the lengths of the bars.

Adams begins well inside Whitman’s poem. He cut the old man’s invitation to remember the war, and the setting opens with a sponge in his hand. Whitman had visited the soldiers’ hospitals, written letters for the wounded and comforted them. In the poem the refuse pail fills, is emptied and fills again.

At the end of Act I of Doctor Atomic, Oppenheimer is alone at the test site and sings Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV, a seventeenth-century prayer in which the speaker asks to be broken and made new. The text was chosen by Sellars. Elsewhere in the opera Adams set words taken from military documents.

In the poem, Rudel hears birdsong from far away, and de lonh returns at the ends of his lines. Saariaho set fragments of the poem in Lonh (1996), written for Dawn Upshaw. Alongside the live soprano, the electronic part has voices reading the text in Occitan, French and English, together with the sounds of birds, wind and rain.

The medieval vida supplied the voyage, the illness at sea and the death in the countess’s arms that became L’Amour de loin. Maalouf named the countess Clémence and made the travelling Pilgrim the third principal character.

In Act I, scene 2, Ariel sings this to Ferdinand, who believes his father has drowned. Meredith Oakes’s operatic version, which shortens Shakespeare’s lines for Adès, begins “Five fathoms deep / Your father lies”. Ariel, a high soprano, leads Ferdinand towards Miranda. The king, whose bones the song says have become coral, is still alive.