Shifting Horizons Songs of Love, Death, and the Sea
Richard Bratby
My very soul is ripped from me And the dark clamor of the waves Covers the noise of my sobs. Who knows if this cruel sea Will lead her to my heart again? —Maurice Bouchor, La Fleur des eaux
Maurice Bouchor, the poet of Ernest Chausson’s Poème de l’amour et de la mer, was singing an old, old song. For as long as there has been poetry, the sea has been a potent symbol: the elemental, natural force that unites and divides, that creates and destroys life. Love, death, and the sea are eternally intertwined. Small wonder, then, that the sea plays a crucial role in that great drama of love and death, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, with its seaborne first act and its setting amid the wave-lashed Celtic coastlines of Cornwall, Ireland, and Brittany. Today, though, we explore that relationship on a more intimate scale. Patricia Petibon and Susan Manoff have combined pieces of many different emotional and stylistic colors to explore these three ideas and their multifaceted, endlessly shifting relationship. And after a brief chorale prelude from Johann Sebastian Bach (from whom the globetrotting arranger of this piano version, Ferruccio Busoni, “learned to recognize the truth that good and great universal
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