'I am a friend and do not come to punish you, You will sleep sweetly in my arms.’
These words from Goethe’s poem ‘Death and the Maiden’, formed the starting point for the text of my cantata.
Whilst assembling the libretto, I was greatly helped by a Doctor friend, who gave me a copy to Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s book ‘On Death and Dying’. It was this book which revolutionised the care of the terminally ill. In it, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross defines five stage, through which a terminally ill person must pass before coming to acceptance. I have used these five stages to define the structure of my cantata.
I do not intend the cantata to be seen as gloomy, perhaps it should be seen as a metaphor for the process of coming to accept any difficult situation. In fact, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages have since been used in a variety of other forms of counselling.
The other influence in the cantata is the poetry of the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. Though originally written in Bengali, he published his own translations of his poetry and it is these that I have used. The selection ranges quite widely over Tagore’s work, taking in some of his longer poems alongside the shorter two line ones.
The cantata uses the Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages alongside an opening an a closing movement, to create a seven movement structure. Apart from the last, each movement concludes with a short chorale like section.
The chorus sing the whole work, with no soloists, but Death is mainly sung by the Sopranos and Altos and the Young man by the Tenors and Basses. The concluding chorale sections are noticeably simpler than the rest of the piece and are mainly unacoompanied.
In the concluding chorus (for which I wrote all the words) the Sopranos and Basses sing increasingly rapturous melismas over the Altos and Tenors drone.
Robert Hugill