Program note for O Greenest Branch by James Rolfe
The song cycle O Greenest Branch was requested by Halifax’s Vocalypse as a companion piece to their production of Hildegard von Bingen’s Ordo Virtutum (ca. 1151). The beauty and devotion of Hildegard’s music are still fresh today; yet at the very time and place of its creation, mobs were murdering Jews in the name of Christianity. I have tried to grasp this jarring dissonance by setting Ephraim of Bonn’s mediaeval Hebrew lament mourning his fellow Jews—victims of Crusader massacres which occurred during Hildegard’s lifetime—and a 20th-century lament by Chaim Nachman Bialik alongside two texts of Hildegard.
This piece opened a door for me to deal creatively with my family’s history. I am descended from Rhineland Jews who lived through periodic exile and violence from the First Crusade in 1096 through to the Holocaust. I hope that what is personal for me will also connect to listeners of our time and place. We all live in the shadow of genocide, whether it took place far away and long ago, or in the here and now, in Canada.
O Greenest Branch was finished in 2019, with the assistance of a grant from The Canada Council for the Arts.
Lyrics for O Greenest Branch (translations by James Rolfe)
Hildegard von Bingen (Germany, 1098 – 1179): Viridissima virga (O greenest branch) (1)
O greenest branch
Ave!
Whose buds burst forth from the breath of holy prayers
Now the time has come for all your branches to blossom
Ave!
The sun’s warmth draws forth from you the fragrance of balsam
The heavens drop their dew upon the grass, and all the earth rejoices
Her womb brings forth wheat, and the birds of heaven nest in her.
Ave!
Ephraim of Bonn (Germany, 1132 – 1200): Lament for the Massacre at Blois
Woe is me if I speak and betray my creator.
Woe is me if I do not speak, if I do not pour out my anxious heart.
Woe is me, all my good days are behind me,
all my friends and dear ones are far, far away.
To whom can you compare me, who has suffered like me,
is there a people, of all the peoples, that has been broken for its sins like me?
Your wrath has swept over my soul, I writhe in pain.
I am stoned, I am struck down and crucified.
I am burnt, my neck is snapped in shame.
I am beheaded and trampled for my guilt.
I am strangled and choked by my enemy.
I am beaten, my body is scourged.
I am killed, I am at the mercy of a lion.
I am crushed as if in an oil press, my blood is squeezed out.
I am hanged, despised, exiled in pain.
I am stamped on, ruined, left to despair.
My blood is shed, my skin turned inside out, my house burnt down.
I am pursued, knocked down by my opponent.
I am raped, I am damned by my enemy.
I am driven into hiding and led into captivity.
Hildegard von Bingen: O rubor sanguinis (O redness of blood) (1)
O redness of blood
flowing from on high
touched by divinity,
you are a flower
that the serpent’s icy breath
never harmed.
Chaim Nachman Bialik (Russia / Palestine, 1873 – 1934): On the Slaughter
O Heaven, beg mercy for me!
If there’s a God in you, and a path to that God–
which I’ve not found–
then pray for me!
My heart’s dead, no prayer on my lips;
My strength long gone, my hopes faded.
How much more, how much longer, how much more?
You, hangman! Here’s my neck—get up, slaughter me!
Behead me like a dog! Yours is the mighty arm and axe,
and all the world my scaffold—and we, we are so small!
My blood is fair game—hack my skull,
and the blood of murder, of babies and old men,
will soak your clothes
and stain them forever and ever.
And if there be justice, let it come now!
But if justice comes after I have been
wiped out from beneath heaven–
May its throne be cast down forever!
May heaven rot in eternal evil!
And you, murderers, wallow in your bloodbath,
May you be cleansed by it.
And cursed be the man who cries: revenge!
Such a revenge—revenge for the blood of a small child–
Satan has not yet dreamed up.
Let their blood pierce the abyss!
Let their blood seep down
to the depths of darkness, and wash away
the rotten foundations of the earth.
Hildegard von Bingen: O rubor sanguinis (O redness of blood) (2)
O redness of blood
flowing from on high
touched by divinity,
you are a flower
that the serpent’s icy breath
never harmed.
Hildegard von Bingen: Viridissima virga (O greenest branch) (2)
O greenest branch
Ave!
Whose buds burst forth from the breath of holy prayers
Now the time has come for all your branches to blossom
Ave!
The sun’s warmth draws forth from you the fragrance of balsam
The heavens drop their dew upon the grass, and all the earth rejoices
Her womb brings forth wheat, and the birds of heaven nest in her.
Ave!
Combined with Jewish prayer:
Sh’ma yisraeil, adonai eloheinu, adonai echad [Listen, Israel, the Lord is our God, God is one.]
