About this work:
If anyone asked me to name my favorite singer, I wouldn’t hesitate. I simply revel in the sound of Cecelia Bartoli’s voice – and have long harbored a secret fantasy that one day she might sing one of my songs. Of course, it would help if I actually wrote something for her first, but I guess that’s not how fantasies generally work. But recently, after listening to her singing one of the songs from Arie Antiche, I decided, why the heck not. Write something.
Sitting in the poetry section of my little attic library, mostly ignored for many years, was a small volume of Italian love songs, so now that I was on a mission, I turned to that first and selected several poems to set. Working in my usual way with poetry in a language other than English, I looked to see if I could find any videos on-line of someone reading the poems, so that I could hear the phrasing and rhythms of the spoken poems. Because I could not find several that were in my little book, ultimately I selected four poems, some from the book, some not, that I was able to listen to, while parsing syllables and scribbling accent marks down on the page.
The poems in the set are by Guido Cavalcanti, Francesco Petrarca, Gaspara Stampa and Torquato Tasso.