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Desire of Ancient Things (1985) |
SATB choir - 8'
This work for unaccompanied SATB choir was commissioned by the Westport Madrigal Singers of Connecticut, USA and first performed by them in April 1985. When I was looking for an English text with a more introverted subject, I was very impressed by the three poems of Arthur Symons, written at the very end of the last century.
They express a romantic nostalgia for lost times and worlds, which is quite a familiar feeling nowadays: a longing for quietness, for unspoiled nature and unspoiled minds. This is expressed by the title of the madrigal cycle, drawn from the first poem. The music expresses this romantic mood (there is even a quotation from a Chopin Prelude) viewed, of course, through a 20th century musical style.
© Petr Eben
On an Air of Rameau
A melancholy desire of ancient things
Floats like a faded perfume out of the wires:
Pallid lovers, what forgotten desires,
Whispered once, are retold in your whisperings?
Roses, roses and lilies with hearts of gold,
These you plucked for her, these she wore in her breast;
Only Rameau's music remembers the rest,
The death of roses over a heart grown cold.
But these sighs? Can ghosts then sigh from the tomb?
Life then wept for you, sighed for you, chilled your breath?
It is the melancholy of ancient death
The harpsichord dreams of, sighing in the room.
By the Pool
I heard the sighing of the reeds
In the grey pool in the green land.
The sea-wind in the long reeds sighing
Between the green hill and the sand.
I heard the sighing of the reeds
Day after day, night after night;
I heard the whirring wild ducks flying,
I saw the sea-gull's wheeling flight.
I heard the sighing of the reeds
Night after night, day after day,
And I forgot old age, and dying,
And youth that loves, and love's decay.
I heard the sighing of the reeds
At noontide and at evening,
And some old dreams I had forgotten
I seemed to be remembering.
I hear the sighing of the reeds:
Is it vain, is it vain
That some old peace I had forgotten
Is crying to come back again?
A Tune
A foolish rhythm turns in my idle head
As a wind-mill on an empty sky
Why is it when love, which men call deathless, is dead,
That memory, men call fugitive, will not die?
Is love not dead? yet I hear the tune if I lie
Dreaming awake in the night on my lonely bed,
And an old thought turns with the old tune in my head
As a wind-mill turns in the wind on an empty sky.