SILENTIUM: Nine-Song Cycle After Mandelstam
Harold Blumenfeld
About this work:
SILENTIUM, Cycle of Nine Poems of Osip Mandelstam, for Soprano or Tenor, Piano. In Russian and sung in Russian with composer's English translation directly alongside Russian text.
Mandelstam, great Russian poet of early 20th century, perished a victim of Stalin's Gulag.
SOUND BITES, sample SCORE PAGES on site.
Composer places great demands on pianist as well as singer. Radical, highly diverse settings...
SOUND BITES: archival recording, performed by Mary Henderson, mezzo, Seth Carlin, piano...
>Former Pub. MMB Music now closed. Published by COMPOSER: blumenf@wustl.edu Score $75...
Cycle opens with vast seascapes, impressionist bursts, moves on through full palette of mood, movement, emotion.
Half-way through cycle we take a break with light-hearted Song V - a rare bit of Russian whimsey. This is a moment with a slavic Bugs Bunny. Here, musical tone brings echoes of a habanera, whisperings of Ravel waltzes, general musical mischief.
After this touch of relief, cycle's earnest tone resumes. Loss, despair, resignation.
In score, text is in Russian [Cyrilic] orthography. Immediately alongside it is composer's running English translation.
SOUND BITES from Songs I and III (in Russian}. English versions offered here. [[Sound bite sections are placed in double-parentheses in following texts]]:
POEM I:
[["She is unborn, yet to arrive,
She is at once both word and music
And thus the elemental fusing,
Uniting everything alive.
Music, words!...
The ocean's breasts breathe softly,
But day, like a madman, wildly glares.
The spume – pale lilacs in a vase
Of vaporous lapislazuli.
O let my utterance assay
The silentness of first creation,
A note of crystalline vibration
Untainted from that primal day."]]
...poem continues...
"Stay sea-foam, Aphrodite, stay.
With word transforming into song,
O let my heart of hearts belong
At one with life's primordial way."
POEM III--
[["Christmas trees in forests flare,
Alight with simulated gold.
Toy wolves among the bushes hold
Your eyes with terrifying glare.
Prophetic pain, oh my despair,
O harbinger of all hereafter
And all the ceaseless crystal laughter
Of a long extinct celestial sphere."]]............
COMPOSER'S NOTE---
"This score of 1979 represents my music at its most uncompromising - 'spiky' is the new term. The poetry invites it. Mandelstam's tragic life itself turned worse than 'spiky' at the hands of Stalin."
Translations copyright 2002, Harold Blumenfeld
Year composed: 1979
Duration: 00:25:00
Ensemble type: Voice, Solo or With Chamber or Jazz Ensemble:Solo Voice with Keyboard
Instrumentation: ,1 Piano soloist(s), ,1 Medium Voice soloist(s)
Instrumentation notes: Virtuosic singer with wide expressive range, Russian diction. Mezzo or soprano; tenor or high baritone.
Pianist uses sparingly applied effects on piano strings [sostenuto pedal depressed], particularly on lowest wound strings, brushing, plucking with fingernails, striking with hand, timpani stick.
Upper strings are stroked, brushed in delicate glissandi with fingers, nails.
Cycle is sung in Mandelstam's Russian, with running singable English translation alongside in score.
SUB-CYCLES performable.
Example: I, II, III, IV, V.
I & IV oceanic, II & III short, impressionistic;
V offers whimsical comic relief with quotations from "Carmen", Ravel.
Other sub-cycles readily fashioned, incorporating wistful, desperate, resigned tones of Songs VI thru IX in order determined by performers.
Virtuosic piano part.