Newly premiered, a piece for the Washington National Opera Chorus a setting of a sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “On Hearing a Symphony by Beethoven.”
As with most choral commissions, finding a text was the first creative task. From a preliminary field of six poems – five of them sonnets – Washington National Opera Chorus Master Steven Gathman and I chose Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “On Hearing a Symphony of Beethoven;” it seemed especially appropriate for these unsettled times. But which symphony? Millay never specified her choice. My guess was the 7th, in A major. The second movement contains both ethereal beauty and rude, insistent, overbearing rhythm.
The piece emerged from the fog at a slow and rather laborious pace – not unlike Beethoven’s own creative process. I declared it finished several times, only to play it through the next day and find more room for improvement. The musical language ranges from comforting Brahms to dissonant parallel sonorities and crashing piano chords – a cry of rage from Minneapolis, where we were experiencing the first brutal days of the ICE invasion. And of course there are references to Beethoven, as well as a fleeting reference to Shostakovich, who sometimes quoted him.
Sweet sounds, oh, beautiful music, do not cease!
Reject me not into the world again.
With you alone is excellence and peace,
Mankind made plausible, his purpose plain.
Enchanted in your air benign and shrewd,
With limbs a-sprawl and empty faces pale,
The spiteful and the stingy and the rude
Sleep like the scullions in the fairy-tale.
This moment is the best the world can give:
The tranquil blossom on the tortured stem.
Reject me not, sweet sounds; oh, let me live,
Till Doom espy my towers and scatter them,
A city spell-bound under the aging sun.
Music my rampart, and my only one.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay – “On Hearing a Symphony of Beethoven” (1928)
