[Valentin Silvetrov] Ode to a Nightingale (Score-Video)
Ode to a Nightingale, Cantata for Soprano, Piano and Chamber Orchestra
0:05 - Text
0:20 - The Composition
Performers:
Ludmilla Vojnarovska (Soprano)
Virko Baley / Kiev Camerata
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John Keats’s great poem, Ode to a Nightingale – his longest, yet penned in a single day – was written merely two years before the poet’s death at the age of 25, in 1821, when he already knew himself to be sorely ill with the tuberculosis that would kill him. The poem springs from hearing the nightingale who sang upon Hampstead Hill, probably in the garden of Spaniard’s Inn, close to Keats’s home at Wentworth Place; leading to a reflection upon human mortality, the brevity of our existence, whose song sputters and fades; the ever-constant spectre of death; the poet buried beneath a sod of earth, while the nightingale (representing the whole of the natural world) sings on.
Darkling I listen, and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death …
… Now more than ever seems it rich to die, …
… Still woulds’t thou sing, and I have ears in vain
To thy high requiem become a sod.
John Keats, 1795–1821 (sixth stanza)
Silvestrov’s Ode to a Nightingale, setting a fine Russian translation by Yevgenij Vitkovskij is a masterly response to Keats’s unsentimental masterpiece; a musical reflection of Keats’s evocation of that water that we are unable to hold in our hands for more than a few seconds – our life.
A traditional ‘through-setting’ of such a long and complex poem would have been a structural nightmare. Rather, the composer builds his score as an endlessly varying mosaic of filigree elements, that unify the 80 lines of the poem as a single continuum. The soprano has a basic vocabulary of (in terms of their first appearance) eight melodic phrases, which appear, for example, in the order:
I – II – III – IV – V – VI – VII – VIII, then:
IV – I (orchestra) – V – VIII – VII – VIII – V – VI – VII, and subsequently:
IV – VIII (eight times, varied) – I (orchestra) – V – VI – VII – II – IV – I (orchestra), and so on.
The endlessly permutated combinations of these melodic elements are accompanied by an uncannily accurate (the favourite perfect fourth of the bird-musician!) secondary mosaic of the nightingale’s song by the solo piano, harp, vibraphone and wind instruments, occasionally joined by the upper strings. The whole is supported above a chord sequence reflecting varying degrees of tension, based around a common tone of F, coming to resigned repose upon an assonant D flat major over the last pages of the score. Yet, the song, the wind and piano filigree, goes on, unperturbed, immune, unresting, fading into the distance; the eternal unchangingness of the natural world.
(Source from CD Booklet of Naxos 8.574123, Written by Christopher Lyndon-Gee)
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