Newer Every Day: Songs for Kiri (Emily Dickinson) Jake Heggie (b. 1961) Commissioned by Welz Kauffman and the Ravinia Festival in celebration of Dame Kiri Te Kanawa’s 70th Birthday First Performance: August 12, 2014 at the Ravinia Festival’s Martin Theater, Highland Park, IL Kiri Te Kanawa, Soprano, Jake Heggie, Piano “We turn not older with the years, but newer every day.” —Emily Dickinson 1. 4. Silence is all we dread. That I did always love There’s Ransom in a Voice– I bring thee Proof But Silence is Infinity. That till I loved Himself have not a face. I never lived–Enough– That I shall love alway– 2. I argue thee I’m Nobody! Who are you? That love is life– Are you–Nobody–Too? And life hath Immortality– Then there’s a pair of us! This–dost thou doubt–Sweet– Don’t tell! they’d advertise–you know! Then have I How dreary–to be–Somebody! Nothing to show How public–like a Frog– But Calvary– To tell one’s name–the livelong June– To an admiring Bog! 5. Some say goodnight–at night– 3. I say goodnight by day– Fame is a bee. Good-bye–the Going utter me– Goodnight, I still reply– It has a song- For parting, that is night, It has a sting– And presence, simply dawn– Itself, the purple on the height Ah, too, it has a wing. Denominated morn. Look back on Time, with kindly eyes– He doubtless did his best– How softly sinks that trembling sun In Human Nature’s West– Song Of The Last Crossing (Magda Bogin) Jorge Sosa (b. 1976) Jorge Sosa is a Mexican composer, currently based in New York City. He was commissioned to write the Song Of The Last Crossing in 2012, to celebrate the opening of the National Opera Center in New York, as part of a larger set of works; the Opera America Songbook. This poem, written by the poet Magda Bogin, is about a woman who is about to die and says goodbye to the two children she cared for during her lifetime; the child that she looked after as a nanny in New York City and her own son, who she had to leave behind to be able to earn enough money elsewhere to take care of him. The song is divided in two parts; the first one in English and the second one in Spanish. In the English part, the woman says goodbye to her Central Park boy, the child she nannied and who almost became more of a real child to her than the child she bore herself, but had to leave behind. It is when she switches to Spanish, that she addresses her own son and her feelings of guilt and powerlessness toward him. I believe this song sends a very strong political message. It is a critique on the nannying culture in New York City, but also on the big social and economical schism which still exists between people today. How for some people the world holds nothing but possibilities, where others are faced with the harsh realities of hunger and poverty on a daily basis. It is a critique on how the world has become accessible and borders can be crossed, but only for those who hold the right passport and have the financial means to do so. It is a critique on our capitalistic society and ‘survival of the fittest’ mentality where the fortune of few very often means the misfortune of many. I held you I raised you I loved you, A la roro niño, a la roro ya I bathed you. I already left, my son. I swept and cooked and made your bed, I returned to the nest. I fed you and cleaned you, Your mother no longer flies. I took you to school. Don’t you recognize me? I sang you to sleep like my very own child. It could be that with the years you have forgotten There were times when I forgot and called you me. mine. The abandonment creates a tomb, My Central Park boy! I gave you the love I should where long ago you let me go. have saved for my own son. The crime of leaving you was not my fault. I told myself I loved you both, I did not go wanting to leave. But it was like paying of an endless debt. But the hunger isn’t punished. A hole like hunger clawed me from within: For what time steals from us, is priceless. My son’s voice reaching me from far away Because the love of a mother never dies. My Central Park boy, I’ve come to say goodbye. A la roro niño. Goodbye to the borders which I have crossed Goodbye to the customs, to crying, to fear. Here ends the light journey, light without bones or tracks. Without ticket I emigrate for the last time. Beyond the light I guess the place that awaits me. There, hours and years don’t exist. Beyond peace and oblivion It is coming, my new home, my destiny. A la roro niño. Translation: Laure-Catherine Beyers In the Early Evening (Louise Glück) John Harbison (b.1938) For the Tanglewood summer of 2017 Emanuel Ax and Dawn Upshaw invited me to write a single song for their Schubert’s Summer Journey program, a six-concert series encompassing music from Schubert’s final year plus complementary works. In setting Louise Glück’s “Poem”—from her second (and first truly characteristic) collection, The House on Marshland—I began with a Schubertian accompaniment figure, in the spirit of that series. This stand-alone song seemed isolated, so I added two more “coming of age” themed poems from the same collection: “Gemini” and “Departure.” These formed a set, first performed together in summer 2018, until I began to hear the need to balance them with a larger, very recent Glück poem, also called “Poem,” soon to be attached as conclusion. – John Harbison Poem In the early evening, as now, a man is bending Gemini over his writing table. There is a soul in me Slowly he lifts his head; a woman It is asking appears, carrying roses. to be given its body Her face floats to the surface of the mirror, It is asking marked with the green spokes of rose stems. to be given blue eyes It is a form a skull matted of suffering: then always the transparent page with black hair raised to the window until its veins emerge that shape as words finally filled with ink. already formed & detaching And I am meant to understand So the past put forth what binds them together a house filled with or to the gray house held firmly in place by dusk asters & white lilac because I must enter their lives: a child it is spring, the pear tree in her cotton dress filming with weak, white blossoms. the lawn, the copper beech— such of my own lives Departure I have cast off—the sunlight My father is standing on a railroad platform. chipping at the curtains Tears pool in his eyes, as though the face & the wicker chairs glimmering in the window were the face of uncovered, winter after winter, someone as the stars finally he was once. But the other has forgotten; thicken & descend as snow. as my father watches, he turns away, drawing the shade over his face, goes back to his reading. And already in its deep groove the train is waiting with its breath of ashes. Poems from The House on Marshland by Louise Glück. © 1975 by The Ecco Press. Permission pending from the Wylie Agency. Feeling the world as it passes through you (Naomi Shihab-Nye) Martin Hennessy (b. 1953) This cycle is dedicated to Judy Cope, a friend and musical colleague from my past whom I was delighted to re- meet after 25 years (“since playing my Juilliard audition” as she reminded me.) We were gobsmacked to discover the paths each had taken. She, from an accomplished singer to a career in arts administration (now executive director of the Sorel Foundation) and I, from many years as a collaborative pianist to a composer of art song and chamber opera. Judy explored my work, admired it and commissioned this piece to be premiered this evening at SongFest 2019. I am immensely grateful for her belief in my music. One important stipulation of the commission was setting the texts of a contemporary American female poet. It was then that I began a series of email and phone conversations with Rosemary Ritter of SongFest whose insatiable appetite for poetry, existential philosophy and meditation practice mirrored my own. Rosemary recommended the work of Naomi Shihab Nye and sent me two eminently settable poems, “Woven by Air, Texture of Air” and “Cross That Line”. Rosemary also recommended two On Being podcasts with Krista Tippett, interviewing Nye which helped me deepen my understanding of the poet’s worldview. “Woven by Air” as a showpiece for soprano was a no brainer and of course, “Cross That Line” would be for baritone. Thus, a cycle for soprano and baritone seemed a logical path. After identifying “Supple Cord” and “Hello” as contrasting pieces for each voice, I pinpointed “300 Goats” as a poem I could fashion into a final duet. Naomi Shihab Nye is known for the petite discoveries in her poems. With a gently probing curiosity she reveals the magic of the everyday and ordinary. However, the subjects in her poems move in a spaciousness and expectancy that take them to the border of the self, where they see their shadow, peer into the abyss, and for sudden flashes, experience the uncanny dissolution of self and other.