A setting of the Yeats poem, for soprano, violin, and piano. Duration about 5m.
Performance: Oct. 26, 2024 (YouTube). Marielle Leiboff, soprano; Manny Vousé, violin; Amy Zanrosso, piano. In the Bay Area Arts Alliance’s Opus 5 concert, at the Center for New Music, San Francisco.
“The Song of Wandering Aengus” (1897) is a poem of Yeats’s early period, telling a compact fairy story in the style of a ballad. It draws on the Irish mythological figure of Aengus, who (in one of many adventures) fell in love with a girl in a dream and pursued her for years. But it’s eclectic rather than faithful: according to Yeats, the direct inspiration was a Greek folk poem. Some of the images are invented, and the silver and golden apples at the end recall both Greek and Irish stories.
It’s a showpiece for Yeats’s extraordinary ear. As with “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, his most famous poem of this period, the rich balancing of every vowel and consonant makes a hypnotic effect, almost burying the content of the lines. (This is a quality he took up from Swinburne and other predecessors, and made his own.)
But for a composer, an even more striking feature of the poem is its rhythmic regularity. Every line has eight syllables (with an exception for “flickering”, “glimmering”, and “brightening”, which have an optional short vowel in the middle), divided in four iambic feet. And the verse is “end-stopped”, i.e., the last word of each line ends a phrase. Yeats took these patterns from Scots and English folk ballads, but carried them out here with unusual consistency.
In setting the poem, I decided to lean into this regularity. Each line of the poem becomes a separate phrase for the singer. The phrases link up into a tune, which repeats for each stanza with small variations. Each time it reaches the end of a stanza, the tune opens out from the short phrases into freer ornamentation. The violin and piano back up the singer’s melody, and frame the stanzas with interludes in a more through-composed style.
Vance Maverick 