CHRISTIAN BÄHRENS: Four Shelley Songs – Høy utgave

CHRISTIAN BÄHRENS

FOUR SHELLEY SONGS

HIGH EDITION

SOLO VOICE AND PIANO

CHRISTIAN BÄHRENS

FOUR SHELLEY SONGS HIGH EDITION

SOLO VOICE AND PIANO

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ISMN 979-0-065-17205-7

Graphic production and print: Norsk Musikforlag AS. www.musikkforlagene.no

Front page: Percy Bysshe Shelley – by Amelia Curran / Wikipedia Commons Page 5: A widow bird – by Horst Zeitler © 2022 with kind permission Page 13: The waning moon – by Horst Zeitler © 2022 with kind permission

A widow bird

The waning moon

And like a dying lady, lean and pale, Upon a wintry bough; Who totters forth, wrapp‘d in a gauzy veil, The frozen wind crept on above, Out of her chamber, led by the insane The freezing stream below. And feeble wanderings of her fading brain, The moon arose up in the murky East, There was no leaf upon the forest bare, A white and shapeless mass. No flower upon the ground, And little motion in the air

A widow bird sate mourning for her love

Except the mill-wheel‘s sound.

Love’s Philosophy

The fountains mingle with the river Music, when soft voices die And the rivers with the ocean, The winds of heaven mix for ever Music, when soft voices die, With a sweet emotion; Vibrates in the memory - Nothing in the world is single; Odours, when sweet violets sicken, All things by a law divine Live within the sense they quicken. In one spirit meet and mingle. Why not I with thine? Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, Are heaped for the beloved‘s bed;

See the mountains kiss high heaven And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone, And the waves clasp one another; Love itself shall slumber on. No sister-flower would be forgiven If it disdained its brother; And the sunlight clasps the earth And the moonbeams kiss the sea: What is all this sweet work worth Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) If thou kiss not me?

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Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Shelley was born and raised in the English countryside and had a childhood close to nature which became one source of his poetical imagination. As a student at Eton he was physically and mentally bullied. The brutality of his classmates and the cruelty of his teachers caused his anger and opposition and the exprience of religous hypocrisy seems to have led to his pamphlet on „The necessity of atheism“ which he wrote together with a friend when he studied at Oxford. Because he refused to revoke his statements he was expelled from University, broke with his father and left home for London. The intolerance and social injustice he noticed there further awoke his longing for a peaceful and caring life which is reflected in his poetry of that time.

He had always been of frail physical constitution and was merely 21 when symptoms of tuberculosis appeared. These vanished completely after a while but left a nervous irritability on Shelley for the rest of his life. In his relations to women he also showed some instability, because he abandoned his first wife Harriet not long after their marriage and was only divorced when he had for some years lived together with Mary Godwin (the author of „Frankenstein“) against her father’s will. His social condemnation as atheist, the family troubles and his physical longing for a warm climate made them go, travel Europe and finally settle in Italy, enabled by Shelleys financial independence through his grandfather’s inheritance. In his self-chosen exile his life ended much too early when he drowned during a boat trip shortly before his 30th birthday.

As representative of the romantic period Shelley is specially known for his long poems like „Ode to the west wind“ or „To a skylark“ but was also a controversial writer in essays on philosophic, social or political issues. He was merely published and less famous during his lifetime, but eventually became one of the most highly regarded and influential poets of the 19th century. Today he is acclaimed for his work, specially his poetic imagery of which the poems chosen for this cycle are a wonderful example.