The Gift of Life (1990 - 1993) (1990)

Composer note
The Gift of Life, for soprano and piano (1990-1993), is a song cycle with texts by Emily Dickinson, Denise Levertov and Thornton Wilder. These songs were written for soprano Judith Bettina, who first performed them with her husband, James Goldsworthy, in Palo Alto, California on June 27, 1993. The poem by Emily Dickinson, “Mama Never Forgets Her Birds,” is set as a lullaby, written to celebrate the birth of their daughter, Ariana Tamar Goldsworthy. The cycle, continuing with “The 90th Year,” by Denise Levertov, and an adaptation of the last lines of Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, speaks of birth, life, memory, loss, death, and, finally, love. This cycle grew directly from my work with text and characters in Tight-Rope, an opera I wrote with Henry Butler in 1985. In these songs, I chose texts according to their power to generate musical images concerning memory, time, and the cyclical nature of existence, themes that are recurrent in my music.

— Chester Biscardi