Four Seasons, Op. 123
Composer: Lowell Liebermann
Publisher: Theodore Presser Company
$150.00
| Movement/Section | Duration: 21.5 |
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From the composer:
"The first order of business in writing a song cycle is, of course, finding an appropriate text. Having decided upon Edna St. Vincent Millay (whose poems I had wanted to set to music for many years but somehow never got around to) I gathered a number of poems that seemed likely possibilities. Millay returns again and again in her poetry to themes of the passage of time, of life and of romance. I knew that I wanted to set the well-known sonnet that begins “What lips my lips have kissed.” Once I noticed that several of the other poems I had chosen also made explicit mention of the four seasons, the final selection became easy.The cycle opens with a poem titled “Spring,” a horror-filled meditation on mortality provoked by the coming of spring. This leads without pause to a setting of the untitled third of eight Sonnets first published in 1922, concerning the transience of love. The third and fourth songs are musically contrasting settings of the same poem, “The Death of Autumn,” transitioning from feelings of anger and horror in the first setting to acceptance and resignation in the second. The fifth song is a setting of the sonnet beginning “What lips my lips have kissed,” a meditation on past loves, and the cycle concludes with yet another untitled sonnet in which the poet carries the memory of a departed lover through the whole year."
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Performer / Ensemble Link Comments -
Pages: 9
Pages (score): 61
Publisher Code: 11441608
UPC: 680160617388
ISBN:
ISMN:
Length: 30.5 cm
Width: 22.6 cm
Thickness: 1.032 cm
Weight: 620 g
