Description
Five Songs after Romantic Poems was written in the early Summer of 2003, while I was in the midst of teaching summer session here at West Chester University. I had recently undertaken a study of Schubert and Schumann songs in my theory teaching and felt the need to react to this exciting music. As I am a countertenor, I spend most of my time singing music before 1750, and most 19th century vocal literature is awkward even in transposition. These songs are inspired by Romanticism but are not meant to be pastiches of Romantic style. My experience with troubadour song, 17th century monody, the exquisite English vocal music of Henry Purcell and Benjamin Britten, and particularly the chansons of Faure and Debussy were other influences on my pen. The texts were chosen for their resonances within me. For instance, Keats speaks of the rules of poetry in musical terms, obliquely invoking ancient Greece and Rome; the poetics of Verlaine and Muset were inherited from the art of the medieval French trouvères, and Wilde’s political rant could have been written in response to today’s newspapers. Baudelaire’s bitterweet musical imagery rhymes with Musset’s, though his mystic sorrow resembles the power of the Will as characterized in the writings of Schopenhauer. Some images return between songs – the bay-leaf crown given to poet laureates, the beauty of sadness that is a common cliché in French art, and the similar light/dark (chiaroscuro) effect of Keats’ poetry. The songs use a variety of tonal and non-tonal elements, with the diction of the text as the starting point for each song. These songs were written for my teacher and colleague Drew Minter.
Mark Rimple
