The Guitar and the Poets

1. Baladilla de los Tres Rios - Romancero Gitano (Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Mario)
2. La Guitarra - Romancero Gitano (Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Mario)
3. Punal - Romancero Gitano (Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Mario)
4. Procesion, Paso, Saeta - Romancero Gitano (Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Mario)
5. Memento - Romancero Gitano (Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Mario)
6. Baile - Romancero Gitano (Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Mario)
7. Crotolo - Romancero Gitano (Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Mario)
8. By the Bivouac’s Fitful Flame - A Procession Winding Around Me (Van, Jeffrey)
9. Beat! Beat! Drums! - A Procession Winding Around Me (Van, Jeffrey)
10. Look Down Fair Moon - A Procession Winding Around Me (Van, Jeffrey)
11. Reconciliation - A Procession Winding Around Me (Van, Jeffrey)

“Would the singer attempt to sing?” is a poetic question about deep human longing voiced mid-way through the second half of tonight’s concert. In addressing this question, Griffin Choral Arts looks to the tradition at Harvard University of appointing an eminent musician such as Aaron Copland or Leonard Bernstein as visiting Professor of Poetry in the understanding as old as Homer that poetry and music are not necessarily separate art forms but are at some deep levels one and the same. This profound truth can hold for all poems (which can be said to be “word music”–one of the reasons narrators are added to tonight’s presentation) and musical compositions. But it is especially the case with tonight’s concert, which may well be the most comprehensively unified program in GCA’s artistic history. While tonight’s two major works appear different on the surface, the number and extent of the “poetic” connections between them (the theme of processions, to name only one significant example) are truly amazing.

Tonight’s featured instrument–the guitar–is another important component of this pervasive artistic integrity. An ancient ancestor of the guitar (whose roots run deep in both myth and reality) was the Aeolian harp. Named after Aeolus, the Greek god of the winds, this instrument was played by the movement of ambient wind over the strings (thought to be the musical inspiration of the gods). Tonight’s concert highlights all of the features of the Aeolian harp: the stringed instrument (the featured solo guitar) and the inspired manipulation both of the strings (and even of virtually all the other physical parts of the guitar) and of the vocal instruments as they sing compelling lyrics that often comment directly on the interconnections among all these instruments. (As we shall hear, one of the concert pieces may even imitate the Aeolian wind.) The lush romanticism of Federico Garcia Lorca’s poetry in Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Romancero Gitano and the searing laments of Walt Whitman’s Civil War poems in Jeffrey Van’s A Procession Winding Around Me are sure to activate our heart strings.

Romancero Gitano, Op. 152 Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, 1895-1968

For this work–whose title is most commonly translated “Gypsy Ballads”–Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco chose seven poems by the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) and set them in a seven-movement suite for guitar and mixed chorus, published in 1951. Although one of Garcia Lorca’s poetry collections was indeed titled “Gypsy Ballads,” the poems Tedesco chose come from another of Lorca’s collections, entitled Poema del canto jondo (Poem of the Deep Song), begun in 1921 but not published in full form until 1931. Tedesco presumably made this selection because he wanted both resonances: a title referring to Gypsy life and poems that directly refer to the guitar–the iconic instrument of the Spanish flamenco tradition (the “deep song” of Lorca’s title). (Ironically, Lorca’s “Gypsy Ballads” collection does not include major references to the guitar, while the “Deep Song” collection contains several other guitar-themed poems that Tedesco might well have chosen.)

Tedesco’s selection of particular Lorca poems also shows the composer’s effort to link the songs in the suite by prominent images and themes: the guitar, swords/daggers, liquid images (rivers/water/blood/ tears), processions, mystical female figures, and an overall elegiac tone of longing for completeness in the face of loss (though sometimes including hints of playful humor).

In choosing the Lorca texts, Tedesco may also have been attracted by elements of the poet’s life, seeing similarities to his own. Although born in Florence, Italy, Tedesco’s ancestry traced to Spanish Jews who had been driven out of Spain in the late 15th century–along with the Hindustani peoples later called Gitanos or Gypsies and the (Islamic) Moors. This nomadic fate of expatriation would continue in Tedesco’s life, when he was forced to flee Fascist Italy for the United States in 1939. He eventually settled in Los Angeles, where he (like other Jewish composers such as Erich Korngold forced out by Fascism in Europe) contributed significantly to the Hollywood film industry, serving as a major influence on Henry Mancini, Nelson Riddle, Jerry Goldsmith, and John Williams. But he is equally highly regarded for his non-film music, of which Romancero Gitano is a prime example. In 1932, prior to his flight from Italy, Tedesco had met the famous Spanish guitar virtuoso Andres Segovia, for whom he wrote the first of his nearly one hundred guitar compositions.

Tedesco no doubt also knew that that Lorca was a musician who had begun as a music student and pianist who also composed songs well into his later (though tragically short) life. Tedesco was surely attracted to Lorca’s poetic sensibility. Living his early years in Granada in Andalusia (southern Spain) in a moderately well-to-do family, Lorca was entranced by the sheer physical beauty of his natural surroundings. Sensuous sensitivity to the natural world, accompanied by a focus on the most elemental passions of human experience, was the foundation of the flamenco tradition, and explained Lorca’s identification with it. Lorca’s sympathies with the “outcast” plight of both the rural poor and Gypsy (Gitano) culture were surely another attraction for the fascism-refugee Tedesco. (While his Gypsy poem collections were a major contributor to his fame, Lorca later resisted being stereotyped as a “Gypsy Poet.” Of further note, for a time in his youth Lorca had believed that he had both Gypsy and Jewish ancestry, a fancy that fit in well with his poetic identification with flamenco culture.)

I. Baladilla de los tres ríos (Ballad of the Three Rivers)

Lorca reflects in his poetry not only twentieth-century Imagist style but also the influence of oral folk narrative in its the feeling of “incompleteness,” in comparison to more formal poetry of the nineteenth century. Like much of his poetry, this is an elegy, a poem of mourning for loss, in this poem of Lorca’s sense that–poetically speaking–he could never “go home again” to his youth. Loss is also reflected in the images of towers and pools near the end of the lyric, referring to the fortresses and intricately beautiful rooms and courtyards of the Alhambra palace, built by the Islamic Moors before their expulsion from Spain in 1492. The three rivers are those named in the poem: the Guadalquivir, the Dauro, and the Genil.

Tedesco selects this as the first lyric in the suite to establish the Andalusian geographical context. The water references find their counterparts in the liquid qualities of the music, both in the flowing solo guitar introduction and postlude and by having women’s voices and men’s voices sing in canon (round), thus imitating the pulsing flow of the rivers referred to. The “O Love” elegiac reflections are, appropriately, assigned to “lonely” solo voices.

El río Quadalquivir
va entre naranjos y olivos.
Los dos ríos de Granada
bajan de la nieve al trigo.

¡Ay amor
que se fue y no vino!

El río Guadalquivir
tiene las barbas granates.
Los dos ríos de Granada,
uno llanto y otro sangre.

¡Ay amor
que se fue por el aire!

Para los barcos de vela
Sevilla tiene un camino:
por el aqua de Granada
sólo reman los suspiros.

¡Ay amor
que se fue y no vino!

Guadalquivir, alta torre
y viento en los naranjales.
Dauro y Genil, torrecillas
muertas sobre los estanques.

¡Ay amor
que se fue por el aire!

¡Quién dirá que el agua lleva
un fuego fatuo de gritos!

¡Ay amor
que se fue y no vino!

Lleva azahar, lleva olivas,
Andalucía, a tus mares.

¡Ay amor
que se fue por el aire!

The river Guadalquivir
flows between orange and olive trees.
The two rivers of Granada
descend from snow to wheat.

Oh love
that left and did not return!

The river Guadalquivir
has garnet whiskers.
The two rivers of Granada:
one of tears, the other of blood.

Oh love
that left through the air!

Seville has a road
for sailboats;
only sighs row
on the waters of Granada.

Oh love
that left and did not return!

Guadalquivir, high tower
and wind in the orange groves.
Dauro and Genil, little towers
dead in the reflecting pools.

Oh love
that left through the air!

Who would guess that the water carries
a will-o’-the-wisp of shouts!

Oh love
that left and did not return!

It carries olives and orange blossoms,
Andalusia, to your seas.

Oh love
that left through the air!

(translation by Robert Nasatir)

II. La guitarra (The Guitar)

When Beatle George Harrison wrote his famous “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” for the iconic 1968 “White Album,” he claimed to have drawn his inspiration from the Taoist Chinese I Ching meditation on the interconnectedness of all things. In some sense he could nearly as easily have used this Lorca lyric, though Lorca again infuses his meditation with even sadder elegiac longing. The “Heart mortally wounded by five swords” can be taken literally as the five fingers plucking the guitar, but it also can refer to the common image of the Virgin of Sorrows, whose heart is pictured in folk art as being pierced by swords. This image of the Virgin anticipates both the “dagger” lyric to follow and the statue on the float in “Paso,” following later in the suite.

Musically, a quiet, andantino sadness is reflected in more homophonic (chord-like) writing, though still somewhat agitated by occasional reappearances of call-and-response canon.

Empieza el llanto
de la guitarra.
Se rompen las copas
de la madrugada.
Empieza el llanto
de la guitarra.
Es inútil
callarla.
Es imposible
callarla.
Llora monótona
como llora el agua,
como llora el viento
sobre la nevada.
Es imposible
callarla.
Llora por cosas
lejanas.
Arena del Sur caliente
que pide camelias blancas.
Llora flecha sin blanco,
la tarde sin mañana,
y el primer pájaro muerto
sobre la rama.
¡Oh guitarra!
Corazón malherido
por cinco espadas.

The weeping of the guitar
begins.
The goblets of dawn
are smashed.
The weeping of the guitar
begins.
Useless
to silence it.
Impossible
to silence it.
It weeps monotonously
as water weeps
as the wind weeps
over snowfields.
Impossible
to silence it.
It weeps for distant
things.
Hot southern sands
yearning for white camellias.
Weeps arrow without target
evening without morning
and the first dead bird
on the branch.
Oh, guitar!
Heart mortally wounded
by five swords.

(translation by Cola Franzen)
III. Puñal (Dagger)

Not surprisingly, Tedesco instructs that this piece be sung with “ferocious movement.” The canonic voice entrances imitate dagger slashes. More homophonic chords stress the vehemence of the “No”s. Yet, lest we mistake this poem as mere sadomasochistic voyeurism, we need to remember the folkloric context: this is another poetic meditation on the common icon of the Virgin of Sorrows, whose heart is punctured by daggers.

El puñal
entra en el corazón,
como la reja del arado
en el yermo.

No.
No me lo claves.
No.

El puñal,
como un rayo de sol,
incendia las terribles
hondonadas.

No.
No me lo claves.
No.

The dagger
goes into the heart
like the blade of a plow
into barren land.

No.
Don’t run it through me.
No.

The dagger
like a ray of sun
sets fire
to terrible
depths.

No.
Don’t run it through me.
No.

(translation by Cola Franzen)

IV. Procesíon (Procession)

Part Four of this sequence of poetic and musical vignettes highlights the strong underlying theme of procession that not only unifies this work but extends importantly into the second half of tonight’s concert–thus helping make the entire concert a unified whole. The three individual Lorca poems that Tedesco sets are “Procesíon,” “Paso,” and “Saeta.”

Procesíon (Procession)

The three chosen Lorca lyrics give poetic impressions of street festivals during religious celebrations of the Virgin Mary and of Christ. The first poem–“Procesíon”–expresses through the voice of the bass soloist a solemn, almost dreamlike anticipation of the feast of sights, sounds, and movement to come in the procession. “Ecce Homo” refers to effigies of the crucified Christ carried in the procession. “Enchanted Durandarte” alludes to a character in the Spanish mock-epic masterpiece Don Quixote, who, like the title character and even like Christ, was a victim of “foolish” love. “Orlando Furioso” is the title and main character of the early sixteenth-century Italian romantic epic by Ludovico Ariosto.

Por la calleja vienen
extraños unicornios.
¿De qué campo,
de qué bosque mitológico?
Más cerca,
ya parecen astrónomos.
Fantásticos Merlines
y el Ecce Homo,
Durandarte encantado,
Orlando furioso.

Along the side street come
strange unicorns.
from what field,
what mythological grove?
Close up
they resemble astronomers,
Fantastic Merlins
and the Ecce Homo.
Enchanted Durandarte,
Orlando furioso.

(translation by Cola Franzen)

Paso (Float)

As the title implies, this vignette is hushed, reverent, and sedately buoyant, much like the “floating” of the platform carried along the procession route bearing a statue of the Holy Virgin.

Virgen con miriñaque,
Virgen de la Soledad,
abierta como un immenso
tulipán.
En tu barco de luces
vas
por la alta marea
de la ciudad,
entre saetas turbias
y estrellas de cristal.
Virgen con miriñaque,
tú vas
por el río de la calle,
¡hasta el mar!

Virgin in crinoline,
Virgin of Solitude,
open like an immense
tulip.
On your boat of light
you move
on the high tide
of the city,
among the shadowy saetas
and stars of crystal.
Virgin in crinoline,
you move
down the river of the street
out to the sea!

(translation by Robert Nasatir)

Saeta

According to Christopher Maurer, editor of the Collected Poems of Garcia Lorca, “The saeta (literally, dart or arrow) is a spontaneous, unaccompanied cry of devotion to the Virgin or to Christ, sung by those watching the all-night Holy Week processions, especially those of Seville. Lorca saw these for the first time in 1922 together with his brother and [with composer] Manuel de Falla” (896). The “lily of Judea” is an allusion to Christ, with the “incarnation of Spain” being a pun on the red of Christ’s wounds or the purple of his Passion robe.

The feeling of watching the procession is unmistakable in the march-like tempo and wave-like canon effects among the voices and the guitar.

Cristo moreno
pasa
de lirio de Judea
a clavel de España.

¡Miradlo por dónde viene!

De España.
Cielo limpio y oscuro,
tierra tostada,
y cauces donde corre
muy lenta el agua.
Cristo moreno,
con las guedejas quemadas,
los pómulo salientes
y las pupilas blancas.

¡Miradlo por dónde va!

Dark-skinned Christ
passes
from lily of Judea
to incarnation of Spain.

Look here he comes!

Of Spain.
Sky clear and dark,
browned earth,
and stream beds where the water
barely trickles.
Dark-skinned Christ,
with long locks burnt
high cheekbones
and white pupils.

Look there he goes!

(translation by Cola Franzen)

V. Memento

Of the shockingly lovely Lorca poems chosen by Tedesco for his musical setting, this may be the most shockingly lovely setting of all. It is a beautifully gentle tango–but the subject is a death wish, though with whimsical humor at the end. If only Garcia Lorca’s actual death been so poetic. The tragic cutting short of his life was a state-sponsored hate crime. In August 1936, in the early years of the Spanish Civil War, at age 38 he was kidnapped into the countryside and shot by Franco’s troops, as likely for his sexual orientation as for his “socialist” politics. His remains have never been found. (The title “Memento” may also function as Tedesco’s memorial to his martyred colleague artist Lorca.)

Cuando yo me muera,
enterradme con mi guitarra
bajo la arena.

Cuando yo me muera,
entre los naranjos
y la hierbabuena.

Cuando yo me muera,
enterradme, si queréis,
en una veleta

¡Cuando yo me muera!

Whenever I die,
bury me with my guitar
beneath the sand.

Whenever I die,
among orange trees
and mint.

Whenever I die,
bury me if you wish
in a weathervane.

Whenever I die!

(translation by Cola Franzen)

VI. Baile (Dance)

The type of dance known as baile is common for female dancers in the flamenco tradition. In keeping with Lorca’s dominant style of observing life as a kind of procession of impressions rendered almost as if a tour book guide through a museum, this vignette describes not a real-life event but the scene depicted on an old woodcut or engraving. It fits in well with Tedesco’s own “Pictures at an Exhibition”-like structuring of the musical vignettes drawn in sympathy with Lorca. The tempo is of the Seguidilla dance, even imitating the sounds of castanets in the female voices over the opening baritone solo. The faster tempo alternates with much slower largo passages, in which the dancer’s expressiveness–especially with her hand and arm movements–is spotlighted.

La Carmen está bailando
por las calles de Sevilla.
Tiene blancos los cabellos
y brillantes las pupilas.

¡Niñas,
corred las cortinas!

En su cabeza se enrosca
una serpiente amarilla,
y va soñando en el baile
con galanes de otros días.

¡Niñas,
corred las cortinas!

Las calles están desiertas
y en los fondos se adivinan
corazones andaluces
buscando viejas espinas.

¡Niñas,
corred las cortinas!

Carmen is dancing
through the streets of Seville.
White is her hair
and her eyes shine.

Girls,
draw the curtains!

Around her head
a yellow serpent coils.
And as she dances she dreams
of swains of other days.

Girls,
draw the curtains!

The streets are empty.
In the deep recesses, hints of
Andalusian hearts
searching for old thorns.

Girls,
draw the curtains!

(translation by Cola Franzen)

VII. Crótalo (Castanet)
As Lorca editor Christopher Maurer indicates, “Crótalo is an ancient name for the castanet, and almost certainly has that meaning here. Crótalo can also mean rattlesnake.” (898). The sounds of the essential flamenco percussion instrument are clearly indicated by the rapid cross-rhythms in both the voices and the guitar, alternating with later sections in which the sinuous body movements of the flamenco dancer are imitated in arch-contoured melodic lines sung in canon.

Crótalo.
Crótalo.
Crótalo.
Escarabajo sonoro.

En la araña
de la mano
rizas el aire
cálido
y te ahogas en tu trino
de palo.

Crótalo.
Crótalo.
Crótalo.
Escarabajo sonoro.

Castanet.
Castanet.
Castanet.
Sonorous scarab.

In the spider
of the hand
you crimp the warm
air,
and drown in your wooden
trill.

Castanet.
Castanet.
Castanet.
Sonorous scarab.

(translation by Cola Franzen)

A Procession Winding Around Me: Four Civil War Poems Jeffrey Van, b. 1941
Despite their many superficial differences, there can hardly be a better companion for Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s homage to Garcia Lorca and the flamenco tradition than Jeffrey Van’s meditation on the Civil War poetry of Walt Whitman (1819-1892). The number and nature of their similarities are striking even beyond the obvious identical instrumentation for solo guitar and mixed chorus: both composers seem almost supernaturally empathetic with their source poets’ themes and very language; both incorporate the guitar as an important poetic theme (Tedesco more obviously than Van, but the latter’s implied reference to the featured instrument is still thematically important); both focus on the theme of processions as a structural device; both look cleared-eyed at even the most disturbing and tortured aspects of their themes and their source-poets’ treatment of these themes in their work and in their lives alike. It can even be said that a concert such as tonight’s featuring these two works has discovered the “Yin and Yang” complementarity between the two compositions.

Performer and composer Jeffrey Van is among the most prolific and widely recognized leaders in the world of the guitar. He has appeared in Carnegie Hall, famed Wigmore Hall in London, and the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. He has often recorded with the Dale Warland Singers, and has served as teacher to Sharon Isbin and members of the Minneapolis Guitar Quartet. He is a member of the faculty of the School of Music at the University of Minnesota.

Of tonight’s work, the composer has written, “The unwitting genesis of this work was an unexpected visit to the battlefield at Gettysburg in the summer of 1989. The richness and depth of that experience can only be hinted at in words. One year later, when the Lancaster [Ohio] Chorale commissioned me to write a work . . ., I was drawn to Whitman’s poems and selected these four from his DRUM TAPS of 1865.” (https://events.umn.edu/prod/groups/public/@pub/@cla/@mus/documents/eventfile/008993.pdf).

Like Tedesco, Van selects and re-arranges poems from his source author. Whitman wrote a large number of poems reflecting on his impressions of the Civil War, but Van selects four in order to establish (as economically as possible) a time line–emphasizing the title image of procession–from quiet anxiety before battle (“By the Bivouac’s Fitful Flame”), to a martial mood as in actual combat (“Beat! Beat! Drums!”), to a numbed bare-consciousness at witnessing the carnage after the battle (“Look Down Fair Moon”), to a final emotional reflection (“Reconciliation”) on the overall drama just witnessed.

I. By the Bivouac’s Fitful Flame

By the bivouac’s fitful flame,
A procession winding around me, solemn and sweet and slow–but first I note,
The tents of the sleeping army, the fields’ and the woods’ dim outline,
The darkness lit by spots of kindled fire, the silence,
Like a phantom far or near an occasional figure moving,
The shrubs and trees, (as I lift my eyes they seem to be stealthily watching me,)
While wind in procession thoughts, O tender and wondrous thoughts,
Of life and death, of home and the past and loved, and of those that are far away;
A solemn and slow procession there as I sit on the ground,
By the bivouac’s fitful flame.

Of special note not only in this poem but throughout the suite is Van’s ability to fit–hand-in-glove– the inherent musicality of Whitman’s ordinary-yet-elevated diction to rhythmic cadences of his own. Van also draws immediate attention to the flamenco-like uses of the guitar as a percussion instrument even beyond the use of its strings. This heightened attention to the guitar, while not so obvious as in Tedesco’s choice of Lorca poems about guitars, is still a clear (though understated) reminder that guitars were surely in common use among Civil War soldiers, perhaps especially in the bivouac campfire scene like those Whitman depicts.

II. Beat! Beat! Drums!

While Van positions this poem second in his “processional” dramatic order, the poem was actually one of Whitman’s earliest, written in 1861 when the excitement at the prospect of war had not yet fully sunk into the general awareness of the true horrors to be caused by that war.

The “fit” between the words of Whitman’s battle cry and Van’s rhythmic phrasing is airtight. Van also increases the “word and sound painting” of his musical effects both in the vocal lines and in the additional exploration of the percussive abilities of the guitar body and components.

Beat! beat! drums!–blow! bugles! blow!
Through the windows–through doors–burst like a ruthless force,
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,
Into the school where the scholar is studying;
Leave not the bridegroom quiet–no happiness must he have now with his bride,
Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,
So fierce you whirr and pound you drums–so shrill you bugles blow.

Beat! beat! drums!–blow! bugles! blow!
Over the traffic of cities–over the rumble of wheels in the streets;
Are beds prepared for sleepers at night in the houses? no sleepers must sleep in those beds,
No bargainer’s bargains by day–no brokers or speculators–would they continue?
Would the talkers be talking? would the singer attempt to sing?
Would the lawyer rise in the court to state his case before the judge?
Then rattle quicker, heavier drums–you bugles wilder blow.

Beat! beat! drums!–blow! bugles! blow!
Make no parley–stop for no expostulation,
Mind not the timid–mind not the weeper or prayer,
Mind not the old man beseeching the young man,

Let not the child’s voice be heard, nor the mother’s entreaties,
Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses,
So strong you thump O terrible drums–so loud you bugles blow.

III. Look Down Fair Moon

If in writing “Beat! Beat! Drums!” in 1861 Whitman had not yet fully realized the horrors of war to come, he has realized those horrors in this deceptively brief, quiet lyric. After the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862, where he had sought to locate his own brother George, a Union soldier wounded in the battle, Whitman happened upon one of his first witnessings of brutal carnage. In the words of Whitman scholar Randall Fuller, “For weeks and months to come, the image [of in Whitman’s own words ‘a heap of feet, legs, arms, and human fragments, cut bloody, black and blue, swelled and sickening’] returned to him, unbidden, in vivid flashes, horrible. . . . [and] appeared in letters home, in notebooks and eventually in the memoirs he published after the war. . . . The poet who had sung hymns to the wholeness of the human form, who had praised ‘the body electric,’ would soon turn his attention to the disfigured and maimed, to men who lay in the hospitals with arms and legs missing, bodies resembling meat.” (http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2011-01/daybreak.html)

The tender desire for the bathing of moonlight almost certainly reflects Whitman’s service as a nurse in Washington war hospitals.

Of special musical interest is the introduction of whistling by the male singers. After three such passages the guitar finally echoes the whistled melody–perhaps Van’s own hint of the Aeolian harp mythic motif.

Look down fair moon and bathe this scene,
Pour softly down the night’s nimbus floods on faces ghastly, swollen, purple,
On the dead on their backs with arms toss’d wide,
Pour down your unstinted nimbus sacred moon.

IV. Reconciliation

If the Irish poet William Butler Yeats was correct in suggesting that beauty can be “terrible,” Van’s selection and setting of this final Whitman poem are almost unbearably beautiful–in the ways that only the best poetry and the best music can communicate beauty otherwise impossible to convey or even to understand in “normal’ or “common sense” experience.

As if to reconcile our emotional pilgrimage through the four Whitman poems Van has the guitar recall faint echoes of the “Bugles! blow!’ melodic theme from the second song in the cycle. More “terribly beautiful” still is the final image that helps bring full circle the image of the bugle (played by the lips) that heralded both the start of the war and its emotionally chastened conclusion.

Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash
again, and ever again, this soil’d world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin–I draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

In confronting the incomprehensible, in answer to Whitman’s question “Would the singer attempt to sing?” we can take him (and Van and Lorca and Tedesco) to mean all musicians and poets. In the face of the inexpressible, the attempt is all.
Program notes by Bill Pasch, copyright 2011

Spanish-language quotations and English-language translations © Herederos de Federico García Lorca from FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA: COLLECTED POEMS, edited by Christopher Maurer. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York rev. ed., 2002). Used by permission.

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