Shadowflowers

Shadowflowers is an unstaged psychodrama for soprano, tenor, and chamber ensemble. The text, assembled from the poetry of Stefan George, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Guillaume Apollinaire, concerns two beautiful, yet repulsive, artificial worlds. George’s poem, from “Algabal,” used in its entirety, presents to the reader an underground garden, beautiful but completely artificial, black, and dead. In Mallarmé’s “Hérodiade,” excerpted here, the reader encounters a beautiful virgin, living in a world of white and jewels, allowing nothing to touch her. The poems are sung together, commenting on each other while carrying on their own dramatic senses. Another factor in choosing the text was the constant recurrence of the words “shadow” and “flower” in all excerpts, which contributes to the black/white, dark/bright imagery. The music is in two unbroken sections, following the shape of the text. Shadowflowers was performed at the Tanglewood Festival on August 23, 1978. The Boston Symphony has recently made its Tanglewood Festival recordings available on request: please contact the composer if you would like to hear the recorded live performance of this work.