Eros: Four Poems About Love
Martin Halpern
About this work:
These four settings treat human love from four different perspectives. In Christopher Marlowe's playful Elizabethan lyric "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love," the baritone invites the soprano to "come live with me and be my love" with many seductive blandishments. In Sir Walter Raleigh's "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd." the soprano counters with a darker, more serious skepticism about male honesty and constancy. In W.B.Yeats's "For Anne Gregory," a worldly older man gently casts doubt on a naive young woman's desire to be loved "for myself alone" rather than her physical beauty. And in excerpts from Wallace Stevens' "The Idea of Order at Key West," the distant wordless singing of an unseen woman, set against the turbulent sounds of the sea, evoke in the enthralled male listener reflections on the power of love-driven art to impose order on the chaos of nature. Melodically and harmonically, all four settings are, in varying degrees, chromatic.
Version: For baritone, soprano and piano
Year composed: 1997
Duration: 00:13:00
Ensemble type: Voice, Solo or With Chamber or Jazz Ensemble:Two or More Solo Voices with Keyboard
Instrumentation: 1 Piano, 1 Soprano, 1 Baritone