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Elegies for Emma
I. Days to Recollect (part one) II. The Walk III. Rain on a Grave Interlude - I Look Into My Glass IV. The Voice V. She to Him VI. Days to Recollect (part two) |
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Programme Note:
This piece began life as a single song – The Walk – written after hearing Lotte Betts-Dean sing for the first time in 2018. The rest of the piece was written over the following five years as a large-scale project celebrating Hardy over 100 years, including a sister piece for string quartet and voice (Elegies for Tom) and a suite of arrangements, emerged.
Thomas Hardy met Emma Gifford in Cornwall in 1870. After a whirlwind courtship (not without the complication of both family’s disapproval of the match) they married four years later. Sadly, over the years their marriage soured to the point of acrimony and by the time Emma died in 1912 they lived practically separate lives, Emma spending most of her time in the attic rooms of their house where Florence Dugdale (who would become Hardy’s second wife in 1914) was a frequent guest.
Within this context, the outpouring of grief for Emma that comes in Hardy’s Poems of 1912-13 is something of a surprise. It is telling that in all Hardy published over 180 poems about Emma but just one of those was written before her death.
These elegiac poems do not shy away from the couple’s complicated relationship. They include regret, remorse and anger but are threaded with love, though often a nostalgic love for the Emma he first courted in Cornwall as a younger man. The poetry is laced with evocative, ghostly imagery, it seems Emma’s presence is always felt from beyond the grave as Hardy writes.
With all this going on this poetry is a dream to set! I hope to retain some of the complex, often contradictory, emotional core of the poetry, evoke the eerie, ghostly tone of the poems and give Emma a voice (albeit through Thomas’ words).
These songs were such a joy to write, largely because it was a deeply collaborative process; my thanks go to Lotte Betts- Dean and James Girling for their ideas, advice and hard work putting this together.
- Arthur Keegan
This piece began life as a single song – The Walk – written after hearing Lotte Betts-Dean sing for the first time in 2018. The rest of the piece was written over the following five years as a large-scale project celebrating Hardy over 100 years, including a sister piece for string quartet and voice (Elegies for Tom) and a suite of arrangements, emerged.
Thomas Hardy met Emma Gifford in Cornwall in 1870. After a whirlwind courtship (not without the complication of both family’s disapproval of the match) they married four years later. Sadly, over the years their marriage soured to the point of acrimony and by the time Emma died in 1912 they lived practically separate lives, Emma spending most of her time in the attic rooms of their house where Florence Dugdale (who would become Hardy’s second wife in 1914) was a frequent guest.
Within this context, the outpouring of grief for Emma that comes in Hardy’s Poems of 1912-13 is something of a surprise. It is telling that in all Hardy published over 180 poems about Emma but just one of those was written before her death.
These elegiac poems do not shy away from the couple’s complicated relationship. They include regret, remorse and anger but are threaded with love, though often a nostalgic love for the Emma he first courted in Cornwall as a younger man. The poetry is laced with evocative, ghostly imagery, it seems Emma’s presence is always felt from beyond the grave as Hardy writes.
With all this going on this poetry is a dream to set! I hope to retain some of the complex, often contradictory, emotional core of the poetry, evoke the eerie, ghostly tone of the poems and give Emma a voice (albeit through Thomas’ words).
These songs were such a joy to write, largely because it was a deeply collaborative process; my thanks go to Lotte Betts- Dean and James Girling for their ideas, advice and hard work putting this together.
- Arthur Keegan