Barcarola (2019)

Barcarola (2019)
for piano solo

A song, over the uneasy motion of a boat, gradually intensifying. Distant echoes float across the water, eventually overwhelmed by more complex currents which obscure the way ahead. The boatman’s song is lost, just its essence remains, carried over the ever-darkening waters.

In the final act of Rossini’s Otello, Desdemona hears the song of a distant gondolier, shortly before her death – setting off a chain of poetic associations that were to coalesce into the genre of piano Barcarolle. Chopin’s definitive Barcarolle of 1845-6 distilled these qualities into a song-sonata hybrid, while Liszt even transcribed Rossini’s operatic gondola song in his Deuxième Année de Pélérinage (1840/59).

The motion of the water, a boatman’s song: for Chopin, and later Fauré, these defining Barcarolle elements were largely abstracted; for Liszt, Desdemona’s premonition of death remains. In his late keyboard pieces, La Lugubre Gondola (1882) the gondolier becomes Charon, ferrying souls into the afterlife, notably Liszt’s own son-in-law, Richard Wagner, who died in Venice in 1883.

Barcarola seeks to reinhabit this world: the Barcarolle’s distinctive motion, its figurative patterns, its formal tropes and poetic associations - on the surface, an imagined boat song, underneath a morbid, dark undertow.

Barcarola is dedicated to pianist Dominic Degavino, who premiered the work on the 25th November 2019, at the Milton Court Concert Hall in London.

Julian Philips, 2023