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- Hugh Wood
Song Cycle to Poems of Pablo Neruda (1974)
- Chester Music Ltd (World)
Commissioned by the BBC
1. Two Humans stand on a promontary
2. Snared by the dying light
3. Steep gloom among the pine-trees
4. In the hot depth of this Summer
5. I remember you from last fall
6. Call the sky mine
7. Tonight I write sadly
- 3(2pic:afl)1(ca)3(bcl)0/1110/3perc/hp.pf(cel)/str(1.1.1.1.1)
- soprano; piano
- 25 min
- in the English version by Christopher Logue
Programme Note
Pablo Neruda, who died in September 1973, is now recognised as one of this century’s greatest poets. The ‘Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair’ which he wrote in 1923 at the age of twenty, and which made his reputation, has sold a million and a quartet copies in the original text alone, for many years has been widely read in the Spanish – speaking world and latterly in the English-speaking one too. Christopher Logue, himself a distinguished poet of great dramatic power – as one hearing of his ‘War Music’ will readily confirm – published his original version of the Neruda cycle in 1959. These imaginative re-creations wonderfully combine the characteristically impassioned, sardonic voice of his own verse with the exotic setting, erotic imagery and passionate statement of the original – to make up work which is both a new poem-sequence, and a translation faithful to the spirit of Neruda.
I first read Logue’s version well over twenty years ago. For a long time I cherished the ambition of, one day, setting these marvellous poems to music, and eventually did so in the late summer and the autumn of 1973. The tragic arch of the classic song-cycle is nearly delineated in the complete poem-sequence. The choice of seven out of twenty poems has somewhat obscured it: there is, for instance too much of an emotional gap between the exaltation of the sixth song and the conclusive despair of the seventh, final one. Not only because there is thus a fault in the formal structure, but also because there are ravishing poems still to set, I hope one day, to return to this cycle.
The first performance was given on 18 February 1974 in the Roundhouse and broadcast on Radio 3: Morag Noble was the soloist; members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Elgar Howarth. On a later occasion Philip Langridge sang. Thus it has been sung by both soprano and tenor: although these love-poems have been written from a man’s point of view, I have imagined my setting for high voice as being equally accessible to man’s or woman’s voice.
Hugh Wood
I first read Logue’s version well over twenty years ago. For a long time I cherished the ambition of, one day, setting these marvellous poems to music, and eventually did so in the late summer and the autumn of 1973. The tragic arch of the classic song-cycle is nearly delineated in the complete poem-sequence. The choice of seven out of twenty poems has somewhat obscured it: there is, for instance too much of an emotional gap between the exaltation of the sixth song and the conclusive despair of the seventh, final one. Not only because there is thus a fault in the formal structure, but also because there are ravishing poems still to set, I hope one day, to return to this cycle.
The first performance was given on 18 February 1974 in the Roundhouse and broadcast on Radio 3: Morag Noble was the soloist; members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Elgar Howarth. On a later occasion Philip Langridge sang. Thus it has been sung by both soprano and tenor: although these love-poems have been written from a man’s point of view, I have imagined my setting for high voice as being equally accessible to man’s or woman’s voice.
Hugh Wood