- Mark Adamo
Late Victorians (1994)
- G Schirmer Inc (World)
- 2(pic).1+ca.2.2(cbn)/2.2.0.0/timp/hp/str
- Narrator (amplified), Medium-high singing voice
- 30 min
- Emily Dickinson, Richard Rodriguez
- English
Programme Note
Text:
Poems by Emily Dickinson
Text by Richard Rodriguez, from his book Days of Obligation
Movements:
1. Nineteen eighty-nine
2. He had been born in South America
3. I stood aloof at Cesar's memorial service
4. Chorale — Sometimes no family came
Composer note:
I could not write. I had been asked to write: the project was to be a set of songs for mezzo-soprano. But I could not write.
We — I and thirty other people from my church, an ad-hoc hospice — had just buried Bob, a man we hardly knew until he fell ill with AIDS. And Don, whom I had just directed in an opera, was failing.
The thing that seemed unacceptable to me was how ordinary this was all becoming.
In October of nineteen ninety-one, Richard Rodriguez wrote a memoir of San Francisco in the first years of the plague. A central image was the Victorian house: those old Victorians that waves of San Franciscans had reclaimed, had refurbished, and were now leaving empty as AIDS swept the city. The once-haunted houses were becoming haunted once again.
The essay was beautiful. But it was too long: too much. I was as resistant to the idea as I was drawn to it. I didn’t want to write this experience. I didn’t recall choosing to witness it.
I needed to write this song cycle, and I could not.
* * *
I reread Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, particularly its chapter on Emily Dickinson. Paglia’s take on Dickinson was violently different from anything I’d read before. For the first time I saw an icy glee, a perverse refusal to look away, in a quatrain like
It played as a joke in 1732. But it seemed very different to me now.
* * *
I ended up writing something quite else for the mezzo-soprano piece. But another piece — this piece — had found shape. I started sketching it at once. The formal, oblique Rodriguez text would be spoken. Four Dickinson poems, singing everything the Rodriguez would not say, would be sung. And the four movements would be linked by solo cadenzas written for players from each choir of the orchestra, after which they would leave the stage.
In its final form, Late Victorians is not unlike the Stations of the Cross. There are still Catholic churches in which you will find twelve friezes, or sculptures, representing Christ’s journey to Calvary and, beyond, to transformation. During Lent, the faithful walk from frieze to frieze; meditate upon the image; and move on to the next. They make a kind of living rosary. The images themselves are static: mere panels. Jesus falls the first time. Veronica wipes the face of Jesus. It is the pilgrim who is dynamic, making the journey from image to image, walking the walk. It is in the heart of the pilgrim that the experience builds.
Late Victorians is meant in tribute to the living and in memory of the dead. I owe a debt of gratitude to Sylvia Alimena, to Kent Ashcraft, to James Petosa, and to the men and women of Eclipse Chamber Orchestra. And I dedicate this score to the memories of the thousands of the fallen, particularly to those of Michael Patterson, Bob Williams, Raymond Davila, and Donald Poe.
— Mark Adamo
Poems by Emily Dickinson
Text by Richard Rodriguez, from his book Days of Obligation
Movements:
1. Nineteen eighty-nine
2. He had been born in South America
3. I stood aloof at Cesar's memorial service
4. Chorale — Sometimes no family came
Composer note:
I could not write. I had been asked to write: the project was to be a set of songs for mezzo-soprano. But I could not write.
We — I and thirty other people from my church, an ad-hoc hospice — had just buried Bob, a man we hardly knew until he fell ill with AIDS. And Don, whom I had just directed in an opera, was failing.
The thing that seemed unacceptable to me was how ordinary this was all becoming.
We have grown accustomed to figures disappearing from the landscape. Does this not lead us to interrogate the landscape?"The only thing I want to do," I told a friend, "is set this article in Harper’s."
— Richard Rodriguez, "Late Victorians"
In October of nineteen ninety-one, Richard Rodriguez wrote a memoir of San Francisco in the first years of the plague. A central image was the Victorian house: those old Victorians that waves of San Franciscans had reclaimed, had refurbished, and were now leaving empty as AIDS swept the city. The once-haunted houses were becoming haunted once again.
The essay was beautiful. But it was too long: too much. I was as resistant to the idea as I was drawn to it. I didn’t want to write this experience. I didn’t recall choosing to witness it.
I needed to write this song cycle, and I could not.
I reread Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, particularly its chapter on Emily Dickinson. Paglia’s take on Dickinson was violently different from anything I’d read before. For the first time I saw an icy glee, a perverse refusal to look away, in a quatrain like
Ruin is formal, devil’s workThat season The Washington Post asked me to review the National Chamber Orchestra’s performance of a famed Haydn symphony, the "Farewell." In it, Haydn had incorporated a small staging joke. He meant to remind his patron prince that the musicians he was keeping in his country palace very much wanted — and deserved — to return to town. So Haydn wrote a last movement in which, person by person, section by section, the musicians left the stage, leaving only two violinists to carry on the song in a bare forest of music stands.
Consecutive and slow;
Fall in an instant no man did;
Slipping is crash’s law.
It played as a joke in 1732. But it seemed very different to me now.
I ended up writing something quite else for the mezzo-soprano piece. But another piece — this piece — had found shape. I started sketching it at once. The formal, oblique Rodriguez text would be spoken. Four Dickinson poems, singing everything the Rodriguez would not say, would be sung. And the four movements would be linked by solo cadenzas written for players from each choir of the orchestra, after which they would leave the stage.
In its final form, Late Victorians is not unlike the Stations of the Cross. There are still Catholic churches in which you will find twelve friezes, or sculptures, representing Christ’s journey to Calvary and, beyond, to transformation. During Lent, the faithful walk from frieze to frieze; meditate upon the image; and move on to the next. They make a kind of living rosary. The images themselves are static: mere panels. Jesus falls the first time. Veronica wipes the face of Jesus. It is the pilgrim who is dynamic, making the journey from image to image, walking the walk. It is in the heart of the pilgrim that the experience builds.
Late Victorians is meant in tribute to the living and in memory of the dead. I owe a debt of gratitude to Sylvia Alimena, to Kent Ashcraft, to James Petosa, and to the men and women of Eclipse Chamber Orchestra. And I dedicate this score to the memories of the thousands of the fallen, particularly to those of Michael Patterson, Bob Williams, Raymond Davila, and Donald Poe.
— Mark Adamo
Scores
Reviews
Adamo manages to convey the pain of loss and the outrage of circumstance without lapsing into the maudlin or hyper-tragic, a very tricky balancing act when working with a subject its composer clearly feels so personally. The most moving part of the work is its final movement, in which the hospice experience is recalled. Here Adamo captures the nobility of quiet heroism...this work will provide solace to all who have experienced the loss of loved ones to disease.
1st May 2010
Late Victorians is cast in Adamo's most expressive and elegiac style, almost Coplandesque in the sense of American lyric melancoly.
In the second movement, Adamo's artful writing of "Crumbling is not an instant's act" is about as skillful a musical setting of a difficult Dickinson stanza as one will ever hear. Indeed, throughout the music is unfailingly sensitive in the Barber and Copland tradition. While deeply felt and emotional, Late Victorians is not overwrought and avoids the melodramatic, rage-at-an-uncaring-society tropes, the understatement culminating in a stoic acceptance and noble expression that is quite affectionate.
Mark Adamo is one of our most gifted and successful young composers and, in its varied way, this programme provides a worthy sampler of vocal and orchestral music from a composer best known for his operas.
In the second movement, Adamo's artful writing of "Crumbling is not an instant's act" is about as skillful a musical setting of a difficult Dickinson stanza as one will ever hear. Indeed, throughout the music is unfailingly sensitive in the Barber and Copland tradition. While deeply felt and emotional, Late Victorians is not overwrought and avoids the melodramatic, rage-at-an-uncaring-society tropes, the understatement culminating in a stoic acceptance and noble expression that is quite affectionate.
Mark Adamo is one of our most gifted and successful young composers and, in its varied way, this programme provides a worthy sampler of vocal and orchestral music from a composer best known for his operas.
1st April 2010
The total output of the music and words, however, is very effective: this piece captures the feeling of empty ambiguity analogous to a scenario such as "I had a friend, and he died. I didn't find out about it until 18 months later...." This is a condition not imposed by the disease, but arises as an external circumstance of it. This has affected countless survivors of AIDS victims whether gay or straight, and Adamo has found the right voice for the situation in Late Victorians.
All Music Guide
All Music Guide
20th January 2010
Discography
Late Victorians
- LabelNaxos
- Catalogue Number8559258
- ConductorSylvia Alimena
- EnsembleEclipse Chamber Orchestra
- Released17th November 2009