THE BIOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE
for Soprano, Viola and Cello
Written: 1990
Duration: 8'
Instrumentation: soprano, viola and cello
Text by Irving Feldman
Premiere: Composer’s Forum, Eastman School of Music, Kilbourn Hall, Rochester, NY, July 1, 1992.
This work is currently unavailable.
Program Note
When I was growing up in Buffalo, NY, my parents had a great collection poetry books. My father taught at the same university as Irving Feldman, and my parents had a few of his books of his poetry—some of them given as gifts from Feldman. The poem The Biographies of Solitude struck me as being a very good poem to set to music.
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THE BIOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE
For soprano, viola, and cello
Blue the hills, red the fields,
where the kisses and blows were dealt ...
How eager they were, marching away,
enlistees in the horde of love.
Farewell the sweethearts
— they never came back.
Welcome, sisters of solitude.
And who will say these lives have been?
Solitude has no biographers.
Nonetheless, hands move across the pages.
Nonetheless, empty pages go from hand to hand.
Nonetheless, papers blow over the landscape
of magical names, the beautiful promises.
One is in snowy Idaho, raging.
One in California sits before her mirror,
considering death.
One takes hot baths in Tennessee,
to calm herself, calm herself down.
In Kansas one scribbles madly.
One walks in a daze in the crowds
on Forty-second Street, barefoot,
her feet bruised, day after day.
In the hospital of the wind.
What the flood has spared is given
into the keeping of the whirlwind.
Day after day the wind
numbering the losses ...
"From now on I will love only myself."
"I no longer try to make sense to people."
"It's all a game anyway."
"Back then I still had my ideals.
No sacrifice was too much for me.
I was strong. I felt everything."
"I don't even pity myself anymore."
They bite their lips.
Shrug their shoulders.
"What is there left to protect?"
"Who can you trust?"
How America is immense and filled with solitudes!
– Irving Feldman
Copyright © 2015 Irving Feldman. Used with permission from Irving Feldman. Published last in Collected Poems 1954-2004 (Schocken 2004) .
Press Quotes
“Many thanks for this... It’s going to take me a while to get used to your very dramatic setting of what for me is an elegaic poem—of women mourning the wounded vitality of disappointed love. Meanwhile, I AM enjoying the drama you’ve created.”