Program note for O Greenest Branch by James Rolfe

The song cycle O Greenest Branch was requested by Halifax’s Vocalypse as a companion piece to their production of Hildegard von Bingen’s Ordo Virtutum (ca. 1151). The beauty and devotion of Hildegard’s music are still fresh today; yet at the very time and place of its creation, mobs were murdering Jews in the name of Christianity. I have tried to grasp this jarring dissonance by setting Ephraim of Bonn’s mediaeval Hebrew lament mourning his fellow Jews—victims of Crusader massacres which occurred during Hildegard’s lifetime—and a 20th-century lament by Chaim Nachman Bialik alongside two texts of Hildegard.

This piece opened a door for me to deal creatively with my family’s history. I am descended from Rhineland Jews who lived through periodic exile and violence from the First Crusade in 1096 through to the Holocaust. I hope that what is personal for me will also connect to listeners of our time and place. We all live in the shadow of genocide, whether it took place far away and long ago, or in the here and now, in Canada.

O Greenest Branch was finished in 2019, with the assistance of a grant from The Canada Council for the Arts; this marks its pandemic-postponed premiere. My thanks to Janice Jackson for asking for the work and presenting it; to Jennifer Bain for talking Hildegard; to the wonderful performers for giving of their hearts, souls, and skills; and to you, the audience, for listening—I have missed you all!

Lyrics for O Greenest Branch (translations by James Rolfe)

Hildegard von Bingen (Germany, 1098 – 1179): Viridissima virga (O greenest branch) (1)

O greenest branch
Ave!
Whose buds burst forth from the breath of holy prayers
Now the time has come for all your branches to blossom
Ave!
The sun’s warmth draws forth from you the fragrance of balsam
The heavens drop their dew upon the grass, and all the earth rejoices
Her womb brings forth wheat, and the birds of heaven nest in her.
Ave!

Ephraim of Bonn (Germany, 1132 – 1200): Lament for the Massacre at Blois

Woe is me if I speak and betray my creator.
Woe is me if I do not speak, if I do not pour out my anxious heart.
Woe is me, all my good days are behind me,
all my friends and dear ones are far, far away.
To whom can you compare me, who has suffered like me,
is there a people, of all the peoples, that has been broken for its sins like me?
Your wrath has swept over my soul, I writhe in pain.

I am stoned, I am struck down and crucified.
I am burnt, my neck is snapped in shame.
I am beheaded and trampled for my guilt.
I am strangled and choked by my enemy.
I am beaten, my body is scourged.
I am killed, I am at the mercy of a lion.
I am crushed as if in an oil press, my blood is squeezed out.
I am hanged, despised, exiled in pain.
I am stamped on, ruined, left to despair.
My blood is shed, my skin turned inside out, my house burnt down.
I am pursued, knocked down by my opponent.
I am raped, I am damned by my enemy.
I am driven into hiding and led into captivity.

Hildegard von Bingen: O rubor sanguinis (O redness of blood) (1)

O redness of blood
flowing from on high
touched by divinity,
you are a flower
that the serpent’s icy breath
never harmed.

Chaim Nachman Bialik (Russia / Palestine, 1873 – 1934): On the Slaughter

O Heaven, beg mercy for me!
If there’s a God in you, and a path to that God–
which I’ve not found–
then pray for me!
My heart’s dead, no prayer on my lips;
My strength long gone, my hopes faded.
How much more, how much longer, how much more?

You, hangman! Here’s my neck—get up, slaughter me!
Behead me like a dog! Yours is the mighty arm and axe,
and all the world my scaffold—and we, we are so small!
My blood is fair game—hack my skull,
and the blood of murder, of babies and old men,
will soak your clothes
and stain them forever and ever.

And if there be justice, let it come now!
But if justice comes after I have been
wiped out from beneath heaven–
May its throne be cast down forever!
May heaven rot in eternal evil!
And you, murderers, wallow in your bloodbath,
May you be cleansed by it.

And cursed be the man who cries: revenge!
Such a revenge—revenge for the blood of a small child–
Satan has not yet dreamed up.
Let their blood pierce the abyss!
Let their blood seep down
to the depths of darkness, and wash away
the rotten foundations of the earth.

Hildegard von Bingen: O rubor sanguinis (O redness of blood) (2)

O redness of blood
flowing from on high
touched by divinity,
you are a flower
that the serpent’s icy breath
never harmed.

Hildegard von Bingen: Viridissima virga (O greenest branch) (2)

O greenest branch
Ave!
Whose buds burst forth from the breath of holy prayers
Now the time has come for all your branches to blossom
Ave!
The sun’s warmth draws forth from you the fragrance of balsam
The heavens drop their dew upon the grass, and all the earth rejoices
Her womb brings forth wheat, and the birds of heaven nest in her.
Ave!

Combined with Jewish prayer:

Sh’ma yisraeil, adonai eloheinu, adonai echad [Listen, Israel, the Lord is our God, God is one.]

Excerpts from archival premiere recording: #13 (“Inward, into the light”) and #16 (“Friday Night”)

Program Note: I Think We Are Angels, a song cycle of 16 songs

words by Else Lasker-Schüler (Germany – Israel, 1869 – 1945); music by James Rolfe

Else Lasker-Schüler was a Jewish-German poet active in the early decades of the 20th century. She was associated with the Blue Rider group of expressionist artists (a group for which she coined the name), including such painters as Kandinsky, Klee, Franz Marc, and Lyonel Feininger. Lasker-Schüler created a body of poetry which dealt with romantic and sensual love, as well as with spirituality and Judaism. Only weeks after being awarded Germany’s highest literary prize in 1933, she was accosted by Nazi thugs in the streets of Berlin. She immediately fled, at first to Switzerland, and finally to Jerusalem, where she died in 1945. Her life was difficult. She had little sense of how to handle money, and often lived in dire poverty. Her beloved son became estranged from her, and then died before he was 30. Her two marriages ended in divorce, and she ended her days lonely and impoverished.

The poems in this song cycle are arranged more or less in the chronological order of their writing, beginning with “The end of the world”, about the death of God. Love follows: passionate love (2, 3, 5), clear calm love (4, 6, 7, 10), innocent playful love (8, 9), love tinged with melancholy (11). “Evensong” (12), with its frustrated longing for God, marks a turning point. Now we have broken love (13) and loneliness (“My Blue Piano”, 14). Death approaches (“I Know”, 15), and we end with a timeless Jewish Shabbat (“Friday Night”, 16). The arc of songs describes a journey: from the youthful celebration of physical, sensual love, we travel through loneliness and a yearning for God, arriving finally at an acceptance of suffering and death. The journey mirrors that of the poet’s life, but it also rings true as a life journey for many of us.

I Think We Are Angels was co-commissioned by Michael and Sonja Koerner and Stanley H. Witkin for Soundstreams Canada (Lawrence Cherney, Artistic Director). The German texts have been translated into English by the composer.

Lyrics

I Think We Are Angels: Selected Poems by Else Lasker-Schüler

1 The End Of The World

There is a weeping in the world
as if the Good Lord had died.
His leaden shadow swoons
and overflows His dismal grave.

Come, let’s hide close together…
Life lies in every heart
as if in a coffin.

O! Let’s kiss deeply–
a longing knocks at the world
of which we must surely die.

2 Shulamite

O, at your sweet mouth I learned
too much of bliss!
Already I feel Gabriel’s lips
burning on my heart.
Oh, how your life beckons me!
And I am undone
with blossoming sorrow,
and drift in space,
in time,
in eternity,
and my soul glows in the evening colours
of Jerusalem.

3 Sensual Passion

Your wicked mouth is my death chamber.
Its sweet narcotic fragrance
sends all my virtues to sleep.
My senses reel, I drink from its well
and sink limply into its depths,
stealing glimpses into hell.

My body glows hot beneath your breath.
It trembles like a young rose
kissed by warm May showers.
–I follow you into a wilderness of sin
and pluck fire lilies by the roadside
–even if I may never find my way home again.

4 Love

Rustling through our sleep,
a fine breeze, silk,
like blossoms trembling
over us.
And I am carried homeward
on your breath
through enchanted fairytales
and buried sagas.

And my crooked smile plays
across the depths of your features
and worlds
nestle with us.

Rustling through our sleep
a fine breeze, silk,
the age-old dream
blesses us both.

5 When You Come

Let’s hide day in the chalice of night,
we who long for the night.
Our bodies are golden stars
that long to kiss and kiss.

Do you smell the roses sleeping
on the dark grass?
So will our night be–
our golden bodies long to kiss.

I keep falling from night to night.
All heaven flowers thick with sparkling love.
Our bodies long to kiss and kiss.

6, 7 I Think We Are Angels

When we gaze at each other,
Our eyes blossom.

And we are amazed
At the miracles we create.
And all is sweetness.

We are circled by stars
And fly out of this world.

I think we are angels.

8 Oh, Your Hands

Oh, your hands
are my children.
All my toys
lay in their hollows.

I always play soldiers
with your fingers, little riders,
till they fall down.

How I do love them,
your boyish hands, the two of them.

9 Giselheer As A Boy

From my eyelash hangs a star
it’s so bright
how shall I sleep–

I’d like to play with you.
–I have no homeland–
Let’s play King and Prince.

10 Night Secret

I have chosen you
among all these stars.

And I wake—a flower listening
among the humming leaves.

Our lips long to make honey,
our shimmering nights flourish.

From the holy spark of your body
my heart sets its heavens alight.

All my dreams hang from your gold.
I have chosen you among all these stars.

11 I Love You

I love you
and find you
even though the day grows dark.

All my life long
until now
I have wandered searching.

I love you!
I love you!
I love you!

Your lips are opening…
the world is deaf,
the world is blind

even the clouds
and the leaves–
Only we—made
of golden dust–
exist!

12 Evensong

Onto a young rosebush
falls a soft rain from heaven
and the world grows ever more abundant.

O my God, my only God,
I thirst and cry out for you
among all your blessings.

Angels sing from on high:
“Today is God’s name day,
He who knows all that shall come to pass.”

And I can’t understand them,
I, who beneath their roof
keep waking in sorrow.

13 Inward, Into the Light

I always think of death.
Nobody loved me.

I wish I were a quiet picture
on an altar, and all in me were extinguished.

This dreamy coloured sunset
stains my raw eyes with tears.

And who knows where to turn
when everywhere is you.

You are my secret home,
and I want nothing more.

How I long to blossom
into your heart’s blue skies–

I lay down nothing but soft paths
around your pulsing house.

14 My Blue Piano

At home I have a blue piano
but cannot play a single note.

It stands in the dark of the cellar door,
ever since the world went rotten.

Four hands of the stars play
–the moon’s wife sang in her boat–
Now the rats dance and clatter.

Its keyboard is shattered–
I cry for the dead blue thing.

O dear angel, I eat such bitter bread—
please, for me, while I still live—
though it be forbidden—
please open Heaven’s door.

15 I Know

I know that soon I must die,
Yet all the trees are radiant
After the longed-for kiss of July–

My dreams have faded–
Never before have I drawn such gloomy endings
In my books of rhyme.

You pick a flower to greet me–
I loved it already in the bud.
Yet I know that soon I must die.

My breath hangs over God’s river–
Softly I set my foot
On the path to my eternal home.

16 Friday Night

The candles burn on Friday night,
Their flames rise up to heaven.
God sees even the smallest light.

I fold my hands in the evening hour
And hear the same thing from all Jewish lips
as we kneel on Friday evening before the flame:
Have mercy, dear Father, and soften their hearts.
My body and soul shall fast on.

Program Notes: Clinical Notes of the Bipolar Therapist (2017; words by Steven Heighton, music by James Rolfe)

Clinical Notes of the Bipolar Therapist sets to music three poems from Steven Heighton’s 2016 book The Waking Comes Late: “Coronach, Post-Kandahar”; “Clinical Notes of the Bipolar Therapist”; and “Humanitarian War Fugue”. The poems look through different lenses at Canadian Forces veterans returning from the Afghan war. I was drawn to them for their vivid portrayal of the traumas suffered by returning soldiers and those close to them. The poems address the men’s struggles with overwhelming emotions and stress, and in particular the difficulties that they face in a society that values masculine self-control and strength—a dilemma which becomes unbearably intense when those men must transition from violence to peace. The poems themselves reference musical elements, notably the coronach (a Scottish pipe tune mourning the dead) and the fugue, which are reflected in the music itself.

The connection of this concert to the 150th anniversary of Confederation offers a wonderfully apt context in which to acknowledge the contributions of soldiers to our country, as well as to give voice to the pain they experience at war and at home.

Clinical Notes of the Bipolar Therapist was commissioned by Continuum Contemporary Music with the assistance of the Ontario Arts Council. My thanks to them, to Ryan Scott (Artistic Director, Continuum) and to Steven Heighton.

The poems: (© 2016 by Steven Heighton)

Lyrics

CORONACH, POST-KANDAHAR
1
The damaged individual is invited to seek treatment, albeit at some future date
Lance-corporal, here— this comfort song, or (if prayer is the protocol you prefer) this prayer.
When you visit the clinic we’ll cook up a cure for your sadness and panic.
Meanwhile pills, meanwhile prayer.
Even to an atheist God’s the Omega of a shotgun’s business end.
2
The patient, still on a waiting list, suffers a major coronary, for which he is promptly treated
His ribcage we cracked and his heart we drew clear like a red, writhing newborn pulled from the rubble.
They said that in public his punchlining brilliance disguised desperation.
Take this, if you’re manic— come visit the clinic— we’ve an opening early next March.
Even to an atheist God’s the cold ordnance of a twelve-gauge applied to the heart.
3
In which an appointment, of kinds, is finally found for our patient
At the wake (closed casket)
the piper was drunk
but managed a coronach.

CLINICAL NOTES OF THE BIPOLAR THERAPIST
1
The Calvados by lamplight is an oily gold, a liquor pressed from bullion. Taste the essence of Norman summers—the fruit-sweetening sun, salt-bearing breezes of the English Channel, flotillas of cloud cooling the coastline. Proustian autumns, mellow and rich; the windless weeks of the apple harvest. Your snifter, brimming with brandy, exhales the scent of ancient orchards.
2
With your patient you are driving a dog-sled over a frozen sea under a sky trembling with a red aurora, blood pouring down a dark face. Your patient yells and whips the team onward. A bitch is whelping as she runs, dropping raw, mouse-sized pups onto the ice. The other dogs scoop them up and swallow them without breaking pace. You hurtle north toward that sky and, you are certain, open water.
3
The drink’s mission is to italicize the effect of several dozen tranquillizers while masking their aftertaste. You arrange the Celestanox (7.5 mg) on the edge of your desk, in neat formation, like a cycle of birth control pills. This really ought to do it. You chase them with another full snifter and taste again those schoolboy summers at Grand-papa’s orchard near St-Valentin.
4
The ones coming back from the war are the worst. You listen and prescribe—rest cure, work cure, drugs. You’d rather not prescribe them but you must. Even dust degrades to finer dust. We find you slumped at your desk in a pool of your own fluids and we revive you, pump your stomach, and your body survives. Bodies are made to, minds not so much. The ones that come back from the war, etcetera. Even dust falls to finer dust.
5
Your patient grew up in northern Quebec, son of a white trapper and Inuit mother. At twenty, Pete saw the war as a way out. And so it was. Up there everyone knew how to use a shotgun, he said, because of the fucking bears, though he never had to kill one. He did waste a guy in Panjwai with his C7 and it wasn’t like online. Wasn’t even a man—wouldn’t a man over there have a beard?
“Yes, I fear so.” Doctor, feel but don’t overfeel.
6
Above all, don’t get too involved! You can care but you must not love! Up north, when a big tide went out, they could crawl and then walk under the ice and it was alcohol blue and they could hear the sea in the far off and Sorels treading above. Pete kept coming back to that, curled like a glove in his chair. Many came home like him, but not all kept shotguns ready. When the tide returns, man, you gotta move fast!
Doctor, I order you not to love.

HUMANITARIAN WAR FUGUE
We killed with the best of intentions. The goals that we died for were sound. The notions we killed for were sterling, our motives the sort that one mentions, frankly, with pride.
Quit scrupling, quibbling, lying down and lay this down: Bad guys by the graveful we gunned down so girls, little girls by the classful, could go to school. Girls, too, busing to school, we slew so girls could go to school unharmed, in error we slew them, with better intentions, bad eggs however we harmed to win hearts, warm cockles, gain guts and livers and limbs and minds with decent intentions, good eggs we even armed (only good eggs armed)—the rest we smashed, truncated, atomized until the doves among us buckled, seldom seeing dead men un-dismantled, while heads of this and that kept touting, hawking our cause like crack, our crystal intentions, motives one mentions especially when aim is less than exact and friendlies get fried . . .
With downsized intentions we killed and we strafed and we mortared and missiled and mined, sniped too, droned too, till we wilted to haunts in OSI wards, nightly wading tarns and tar-ponds incarnadine, and they dosed and discharged and forsook us, but on we kept killing with credible reasons in a lush neural loop of gibbering visions from hovering gunships, maniacally hooting, culling the groundlings with motives forgotten to a playlist of metal eternally cycling . . .
Of course, looking back, you would like to reboot and start over, but there is no over— this spraying and shredding forever recursive— this Gatling drum always ample with ammo— and papa and papa our weapons keep bleating— a ceaseless returning and endless rehearsing— you’re killing with the best of with the best of them killing with the best of with the best of them, killing,

Against Nature: synopsis

Des Esseintes, a jaded, wealthy aristocrat, disenchanted with his life of urban debauchery, decides to seclude himself in a country estate, far from the society and temptations of Paris. Apart from an elderly couple as servants, he cuts himself off absolutely from society. He recreates nature within his chateau, sparing no expense or artifice to improve upon the original. An aquarium is constructed, complete with mechanical fish and the deck of a ship. He devours not only books but entire literatures—Roman and Greek and French classics—only to reject almost every author except his beloved Baudelaire. A living tortoise is encrusted with jewels, the better to match his sumptuous oriental rugs, only to have the tortoise die, whereupon he has it thrown out. A greenhouse is set up with the rarest, most expensive flowers, but they too fade and die. And so it goes with paintings, with music, with a contortionist-prostitute: all fail to satisfy him before he loses interest.

As he experiments, Des Esseintes experiences flashbacks to his youth: his days at Catholic boarding school, his youthful excesses. Meanwhile, his rich diet, odd hours, lack of society, and staying indoors for months on end cause his health to decline rapidly. His doctor prescribes fresh air, exercise, and a healthy diet, but this advice is ignored. He sets out instead on a journey to England, but doesn’t make it out of France before he retreats to his home. At last he becomes so ill that his doctor tells him he must give up his chateau in favour of Paris or face certain death. At this, he relents, and reluctantly leaves the countryside to return to Paris.

Against Nature is the story of a man who is prepared to sacrifice his health in his quest for the most beautiful, the finest, the most intense aesthetic experiences. He catalogues each sensory pleasure, and rejects anything that falls short of his standards. Setting himself apart and against society, and against the compromises necessary to live this life, he fails in his experiment—fails badly, but heroic ally.

Excerpts from reviews

Rolfe’s score is an accomplishment: spare, ominous and atmospheric. It’s sung with clarity and sustained feeling by Dobson in the lead role (The Master), who finds the necessary electric mania in his eyes. – Martha Schabas, The Globe and Mail, 6 May 2016

Rolfe’s score was both sensitive to the needs of the singer while creating a beautiful sonority in the trio … there were moments where they blended so well with the singers that it was hard to tell which instrument onstage was actually producing the pitch. The effect was mesmerizing. Bravi tutti. – Greg Finney, Scmopera. 13 May 2016

Fresh Face was commissioned by Soundstreams Canada on the occasion of their 30^th anniversary. It is dedicated to R. Murray Schafer, who suggested the musical theme (S-C-H-A-F-E-R) on which the words and music are built.

As an Anglo-Canadian composer writing a tango, I’m skating on thin ice. How can my stolid northern soul find its way into the very particular poetry, singing, rhythm, and soul of this dance? This tango is an imaginary journey, as I clutch my own peculiar musical baggage, and Federico García Lorca guides me. His incandescent ghazal lends both spark and structure, leading me through the dance.

always, always: garden of my agony,
your body always elusive,
the blood of your veins in my mouth,
your mouth already my tomb, empty of light.

Bird is a collaboration between composers John Oswald and James Rolfe, based on Leonard Cohen’s song Bird on a Wire. The words and music of the original are reworked freely with extended phrases, ornaments, modulations, and interpolations.

Dust was written for a concert with the theme of Vienna, a city which conjures up both the Great Germanic tradition (as exemplified by Vienna-based composers such as Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern) and a light, frivolous style (as in the waltzes of the Strauss family).

Since his death in 1892, Walt Whitman has become an unwitting collaborator for a steady stream of composers, myself included; four of these texts I have previously set, in 1990.  Despite its high romantic tone, Whitman’s verse remains palatable to our ears: the beauty of his language, his loving attention to its rhythm and sound, and his direct, unpretentious tone make him one of the most approachable of poets.  These songs are mostly from the earlier books of Leaves of Grass, verses which explore facets of desire, be they quiet, turbulent, or defiant.  In my earlier settings, I explored the texts more for sound than for meaning, but this time I have approached them more traditionally, as art songs, trying to hold up a musical mirror to their essences.

Six Songs were commissioned by Soundstreams (Lawrence Cherney, Artistic Director) through The Ontario Arts Council.

Six poems by Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass

I heard you solemn sweet pipes of the organ

I heard you solemn sweet pipes of the organ as last Sunday I pass’d the church,

Winds of Autumn, as I walk’d the woods at dusk I heard your long stretch’d sighs up above so mournful,

I heard the perfect Italian tenor singing at the opera, I heard the soprano in the midst of the quartet singing;

Heart of my love! You too I heard murmuring low through one of the wrists around my head,

Heard the pulse of you when all was still singing little bells last night under my ear.

Not heaving from my ribb’d breast only

Not heaving from my ribb’d breast only,

Not in sighs at night in rage dissatisfied with myself,

Not in those long-drawn, ill-supprest sighs,

Not in many an oath and promise broken,

Not in my wilful and savage soul’s volition,

Not in the subtle nourishment of the air,

Not in this beating and pounding at my temples and wrists,

Not in the curious systole and diastole within me which will one day cease,

Not in many a hungry wish told to the skies only,

Not in cries, laughter, defiances, thrown from me when alone far in the wilds,

Not in husky pantings through clench’d teeth,

Not in sounded and resounded words, chattering words, echoes, dead words,

Not in the murmurs of my dreams while I sleep,

Nor the other murmurs of these incredible dreams of every day,

Nor in the limbs and senses of my body that take you and dismiss you continually—not there,

Not in any or all of them O adhesiveness! O pulse of my life!

Need I that you exist and show yourself any more than in these songs.

O you whom I often and silently come

O you whom I often and silently come where you are that I may be with you,

As I walk by your side, or sit near, or remain in the same room with you,

Little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is playing within me.

Trickle drops

Trickle drops! my blue veins leaving!

O drops of me! trickle, slow drops,

Candid from me falling, drip, bleeding drops,

From wounds made to free you whence you were prison’d,

From my face, from my forehead and lips,

From my breast, from within where I was conceal’d, press forth red drops, confession drops,

Stain every page, stain every song I sing, every word I say, bloody drops,

Let them know your scarlet heat, let them glisten,

Saturate them with yourself all ashamed and wet,

Glow upon all I have written or shall write, bleeding drops,

Let it all be seen in your light, blushing drops.

One hour to madness and joy

One hour to madness and joy! O furious! O confine me not!

O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man!

O savage and tender achings!

O to be yielded to you whoever you are, and you to be yielded to me in defiance of the world!

O to return to Paradise! O bashful and feminine!

O to draw you to me, to plant on you for the first time the lips of a determin’d woman.

O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last!

To have the gag remov’d from one’s mouth!

To escape utterly from others’ anchors and holds!

To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous!

To ascend, to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me!

To rise thither with my inebriate soul!

To be lost if it must be so!

To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom!

With one brief hour of madness and joy.

A clear midnight

This is thy hour O soul, a free flight into the wordless,

Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,

Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,

Night, sleep, death, and the stars.