Song Cycle for Medium Voice

Duration: ca. 20 minutes

Premiere: 04.25.2024, Tessa Fackelmann, mezzo-soprano; Rachel Chao, piano

Program Notes: Songs of Solemn Dreaming is a song cycle of six poems by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado as translated to English by Betty Jean Craige. I usually choose to set texts in their original language but in this case, I admired the translator’s work and thought the translations could open up Machado’s mind to new audiences. Anyone familiar with Machado’s poetry in Spanish will appreciate many of its characteristic features (rhyming, rhythms, words without English equivalents). My hope here is that music can help compensate for at least some of what is inevitably lost in translation.

The title of this song cycle is taken from a line in the first poem set here. Although the six poems are not all “dreams”, Betty Jean Craige explains that “for Machado, dreaming is an active state of reverie in which he evokes and elaborates the past or transforms the present…” Each poem in this set reveals a distinct facet of the poet’s profound state of “dreaming”. It is in this solemn dreaming that he accesses and sharpens his expressive voice. In this dreaming, the line between memory and creative imagination begins to blur. And in this dreaming, across a range of emotions, the poet reflects on human existence in a language rich with symbols and sensory allusions to the Spanish countryside. –DK

Hear samples of Songs of Solemn Dreaming below: