This piece is my first foray into writing operatically, pairing it with Beethoven’s Choral Symphony and concludes my Beethoven Episodes, a collection of orchestral works serving as contemporary musical tributes to his symphonies as well as my own personal meditations on life amid the Covid-19 Pandemic.
I draw from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land for my text, a poem which can hardly be summarized in one sentence beyond saying it is a deeply metafictional text evocative of a world once rich becoming poor, if not destroyed, yet with hope nevertheless holding fast. That’s my understanding of the poem, a casual reader and lover of symbolic poetry. The sung extracts are ultimately tips of the iceberg regarding how the text inspires the musical evocations, and I highly recommend a dive into it.
Structurally and narrative-wise, this piece could very well be a “heap of broken images.” We begin with a cocktail party where the four characters (SATB) are reminiscing about life before the Apocalypse. Then, we have a scene of a gentleman describing the survivors wandering in a state of calm, serenity. Next, a woman calls her lover in a panic, yet his response is an equal and uncomforting anxiousness. Finally, two characters express relief, appropriately stating, I’m glad it’s over. Between these scenes, the Turkish march from Beethoven’s Ninth is turned into a broad and wordless chorale. If this work were to happen alongside the paired symphony, I wrote it in a manner where the last chord of my piece begins his.
Thus concludes this journey of writing. I will quote W. B. Yeats: “I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”
