Walter Arlen: Houses of Worship (Two Canticles for high voice and piano)

For high voice and piano

Composer note
I. Sine Nomine (1995, from The Hall, poem by Czesław Miłosz) deals with a person passing over the threshold of death into the unknown after this life. The nameless house of worship represents the poet’s imagination as much as his vision of serenely waking up in the next world, a nondenominational next world, the world about which we know nothing. The song was composed in memory of my aunt Gretl, my mother’s youngest sister. I visited her every day as she slipped into death.

II. The Isaiah of Souillac (1956, poem by William Stanley Merwin) describes a sculpture in the 12th-century Romanesque cathedral in Souillac, on the Massif Central of southwest France. Its motion in stone gave rise to a poetic description of the passion found in Isaiah’s prophecies.

— Walter Arlen

About the Exilarte Edition
G. Schirmer/Wise Music’s Exilarte Edition exclusively publishes works by composers who were persecuted, forced into exile or murdered by the Nazi regime. Nearly all original manuscripts of these works are archived in the Exilarte Center at the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna in Austria.