Daylight Divine (2001)
For solo soprano, children's chorus and chamber orchestra
Chamber Orchestra of Paris and Soli Deo Gloria, June 2001
Duration: 20 minutes
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Click to hear excerpts from this work (excerpt 1, excerpt 2) |
Texts: Two poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Windhover and Pied Beauty
The Windhover
To Christ our Lord
I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dáwn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rólling level úndernéath him steady áir, & stríding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl & gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, — the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty & valour & act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, o my chevalier!
No wónder of it: shéer plód makes plóugh down síllion
Shine, & blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gáll themsélves, & gásh góld-vermílion.
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things —
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted & pieced — fold, fallow, & plough;
And áll trades, their gear & tackle & trim.
All things counter, original, spáre, strange;
Whatever is fickle, frecklèd, (who knows how?)
With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change:
Práise hím.
Inspiration and brief description of my approach to the piece:
Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in 1844 and died in 1889 at the age of 45. His poems illustrate an extraordinary sensitivity to gracefulness and beauty in nature and in mankind. The musicality, honesty, passion, and penetration of the poems of Hopkins attract me to his work for our project.
Knowing that the work would premiere in the Saint-Denis' Basilica, it seemed fitting in so many ways to set these texts as Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit priest and his poems approach the world with a deep devotion to God.
Catherine Phillips wrote:
"The central experience of Gerard Manley Hopkins' life was an experience of feeling God's presence in nature so that perceiving the essence or "inscape" of a thing was to perceive some part of God and even to feel at times that it was possible to communicate directly with him through nature. Nature and religious worship infuse one another. Gerard Manley Hopkins invented a second term "instress" to indicate he force that held the thing or the individual together or described a momentary flash of communication between the observer and the thing observed."
Hopkins was independent thinking and his sense of rhythm and rhyme (he invented the term "spring-rhythm") are magical and musical.
I tried to set the two texts in an extremely "musical" manner, listening to the sound of the poems and deeply understanding their meaning in my heart and soul.
There is a brief orchestral interlude between the two movements and, throughout the score, the children's chorus is divided into several subdivisions (2,4,6,8, etc.) allowing for rich harmonies, counterpoint, and antiphonal sections.
The words and meanings of these Hopkins texts are so intensely mature ("my heart in hiding stirred for a bird, — the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!) while at the same time so playful ("For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow;"). For this reason, I used a solo soprano as well as a children's chorus. Having a mature voice in the solo soprano along with young voices seems to capture for me the essence of the poems and their spirituality.
Augusta Read Thomas
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