Five Songs on Poems by Arthur Symons for high voice High Voice - Digital Sheet Music

SKU: A0.933494

Five Songs is based on poems by the British poet Arthur Symons (1865-1945). The first, Love in Spring I, is a strophic setting of Symons’s lyric on the fleeting romances of springtime. The first two stanzas are set to the same music, while the third is slightly changed to reflect the pauses inherent within the text. Love in Spring II develops upon the same theme. A lilting compound meter accompanies the poet as he recollects a past romance throughout the first and second stanzas, but is supplanted by a plain duple meter in the third to reflect their now passionless reunion. In the Valley uses a simple motif, heard in the first measure of the vocal melody, along with its inversion, and contrasting keys to expresses Symons’s text of anxious awaiting. From the gloomy G minor of the opening, it ventures into B major as the poet longs for his beloved. It then briefly settles into G-sharp minor as he resigns himself to waiting, just before the hopeful G major conclusion. Fête Champêtre makes uses of piquant appoggiaturas and broken chords to capture the mystical setting of the text. In the latter half of the song, the music remains rooted on a dominant pedal to symbolize the chain now binding the hearts of the two lovers. Lastly, In Fountain Court develops out of a canon heard during the piano’s introduction. Imitations exist throughout the poem’s two stanzas, but it isn’t until the expectant final lines that voice and piano together take up the canon, taking over each other’s melodic lines until the climatic final note is reached.