A. Dixon: Songs to Medieval Latin Lyrics
Expected to ship in 2-3 weeks.
Shipping Policy- Composer: Ailsa Dixon (1932-2017)
- Instrumentation: Piano, High Voice
- Work: Songs to Medieval Latin Lyrics (1991)
- Size: 8.3 x 11.6 inches
Description
for soprano or tenor and piano
Cuckoo, come! and the two Songs for Sarah are settings of poetry from Helen Waddell's 1929 translation of Medieval Latin Lyrics.
The lines set in Cuckoo, Come! are from the end of ‘The Strife Between Winter and Spring' by Alcuin, a Carolingian writer and scholar originally from York. The contest between the two seasons is focused on the song of the cuckoo as the harbinger of spring. At the outset of the poem, winter had done his worst to hold the cuckoo's song at bay (‘Let him not come'), but eventually ‘Old Palemon spake from his high seat' to adjudicate the contest, and pronounces spring the victor with this lyric.
The two Songs for Sarah were written for the composer's elder daughter, setting a short lyric by the 9th-century Benedictine monk and scholar, Walafrid Strabo. The poem is headed ‘To a friend in absence' and imagines the moon's radiance shining down on two friends or lovers separated by distance, so that ‘in one splendour foldeth gloriously Two that have loved, and now divided far, Bound by love's bond, in heart together are'.
‘Cum Splendor Lunae' sets the Latin original in recitative style, while ‘When the moon's splendour' gives a more lyrical setting of Helen Waddell's English translation of the same lines. They join a long tradition of love songs setting poetry addressed to or musing on the moon, including many German lieder and Dvořák's famous ‘Song to the Moon' from his opera Rusalka. While most are settings of Romantic poets such as Heine and Goethe, the words of this striking and tender lyric by a medieval monk predate them by almost a millennium.
© Josie Dixon
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A. Dixon: Songs to Medieval Latin Lyrics
