Instrumentation: for tenor and piano

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Composition Year: 2021

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Duration: ca.6 minutes

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The Rose in the Deeps of His Heart premiered in Williams Hall, New England Conservatory, Boston, MA on April 16, 2021 performed by Philippe LEsperance and Gayoung Park.

 

The Rose in the Deeps of His Heart Text:
by William Butler Yeats
 

All things uncomely and broken,
all things worn-out and old,
The cry of a child by the roadway,
the creak of a lumbering cart,
The heavy steps of the ploughman,
splashing the wintry mould,
Are wronging your image that blossoms
a rose in the deeps of my heart.
The wrong of unshapely things
is a wrong too great to be told;
I hunger to build them anew
and sit on a green knoll apart,
With the earth and the sky and the water,
remade, like a casket of gold
For my dreams of your image that blossoms
a rose in the deeps of my heart.

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Program Notes:

The Rose in the Deeps ofHis Heart is written for tenor and piano. I was moved
by Yeats’ poem The Rose in the Deeps of His Heart. He presents images of a
bleak and broken world in the first two stanzas and expresses desire to refashion this world for a love he keeps deep in his heart. I responded to the narrator’s anxiety in the music with more density in the piano and vocal writing: I used clusters and interlocking rhythmic gestures in the piano part, and extreme
registers for both voice and piano. A piano interlude gradually introduces more
transparency in the harmonic language and more unity in texture as the poet
begins to reshape his inner world to greater optimism in the final two verses. In
the end I used a very pure and resonant E flat Major triad chord to mark a clear
departure from the opening d minor. And this also illustrates the possibilities of
the poet’s dreams that blossom as a rose in the deeps of his heart.

 

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