Meditation
Song for Voice and Piano
PROGRAM NOTE
Ken Masur introduced me to Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil as a teenager in the summer of 1996 at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute. This was heady stuff for a boy from Utah but I was intoxicated by the darkly beautiful imagery. I set this poem before I knew Debussy had beat me to it.
TEXT
Meditation
Be still, my Sorrow; hold to your tranquility,
You pled for Evening; darkness falls, the evening’s here:
A somber air pervades the city, quietly
Bestowing peace on some; to others bringing care.
While all those loathsome multitudes of mortals loll
Beneath the whip of Lust the executioner,
Or scrabble for remorse in craven festival,
My Sorrow, take my hand and come away, come far
From all of them. Behold the dead Years leaning down
From balconies of heaven, dressed in faded gown;
Up from the water’s depths, Regret has risen, smiling;
The dying Sun has sunk asleep beneath its arch,
And, like a winding cloth that from the East comes trailing,
We hear, dear one, we hear the tender Night’s approach.
-Charles Baudelaire
translated by William H. Crosby