Let Evening Come - Soprano Solo & Piano
Let Evening Come - Soprano Solo & Piano
Soprano Solo & Piano (2023)
17 min.
Texts by Jane Kenyon
Text copyright © Estate of Jane Kenyon
All rights reserved. Used with permission.
New Hampshire’s poet laureate at the time of her untimely death at age forty-seven, Jane Kenyon explored the depths of the inner psyche, particularly with regard to her own battle against depression. My own father, Donald Sheehan—who was a poet and writer himself, as well as someone who struggled with depression—was a close personal friend of Kenyon’s. He spent time with her frequently during the last months of her life and was at her bedside when she passed away in 1995, when I was fifteen. My setting of Kenyon’s work draws on four poems that I feel capture different stages of a woman’s life as she might look back on them in her last days, as well as an attempt to piece together for myself an image of what her experience might have been like.
Evening Sun looks back on childhood with a bright sadness, remembering both the joy of being young and the agony of discovering, even in youth, that one “would have to live and go on living.” With gentle yet agitated arpeggios in the harp, and long slow reaching lines in the cello, the music attempts to capture the paradox of being alive, energetic, and restless, and yet feeling at the same time that life in all its depth and complexity represents an almost intolerable burden. The song culminates in a furious struggle between these two poles, with wild glissandos in the harp, aggressive double-stops in the cello, and the soprano in their extreme upper register. The final lines of the song offer not so much a resolution as a question: how can all of this be inside me, especially in my childhood self, and yet “not destroy my heart”?
Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks is song about loving and being loved. There is a warmth and sweetness in the knowledge that someone other than yourself is aware of you, is with you, is thinking the same thoughts as you, but there is also an undercurrent of sadness as if this closeness is something remembered, or something that might even now be slipping away. The music is a gentle 5/4 ballad in song form, reminiscent of pop music or Broadway, but still inhabiting an art-song space in its harmonic language.
In the Nursing Home is reflection on the profound constriction that one experiences in old age, and a plea that it might finally be brought to a close. The harp, voice, and cello all circle around one another in a three-voice canon that gradually decreases in rhythmic vitality, and then gently winds to a close on a simple major third between E-flat and G. While perhaps the bleakest song of the set, this song still offers a sense of hope that one’s last end will be experienced as a gentle release from struggles rather than as a tragic destruction of the self.
Let Evening Come closes out the cycle in a winding, chant-like hymn of acceptance. It is a song about letting happen what will happen, and choosing not be afraid. In the closing passages, on the text “God does not leave us comfortless,” a hint of the intensity of the first song returns, with harp, cello, and voice all rushing up into their upper registers. But then the tension subsides, the burden of living is set down, and the song softly winds to a close on a D-G open fifth.
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