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THE LIGHT – SONGS
OF LOVE AND FEAR
Four Nordic
Songs brings together pieces that
were written for different female singers during a period of
thirty years. It was not until the last one, The Border,
which I wrote for my wife’s 50th birthday in 2006,
that I realised that all these songs were, in addition to love
songs, songs that (in their Nordic background, reflecting this
area’s nature, light and peripheral location) discussed the
ability of men and women to attain a more profound understanding
of each other across gender lines. This theme is addressed in
more depth in The Night: the kind of love that would
wither in the light of day – the “society” that two people can
create all by themselves, which cannot be deciphered by the rest
of the world.
While both The
Border and The Night arise from the desire to map out
the art of the possible, By the Fjord is a song about the
impossible: the love between the Norwegian anarchist Hans Jæger
and his best friend’s fiancée, the painter Oda Lasson, later Oda
Krohg. My novel Oda! (Insel Verlag 2008) is based on
Jæger’s self-revealing writings of the 1880s, and takes its
point of departure in Karen Blixen’s motto, “Longing itself is a
pledge that what we long for exists.” Their dramatic love affair
shocked the Norwegian artists’ community and exerted
considerable influence on painter Edvard Munch, for one.
Summer Song
was written for the opening of Randi Stene’s first Summer Song
Festival at Ringve, Norway’s national museum for music and
musical instruments, near Trondheim. This song elaborates on the
themes touched on in By the Fjord: the possible versus
the impossible, man versus woman – the eternal fear of being
found wanting, the longing for approval that everyone feels in
one way or another.
The mysteries of
love are a recurring theme in the poetry of John Donne
(1572-1631). The fact that he expected to be remembered as a
great preacher rather than a great poet says something about his
existential point of view. Great poetry – although written in
the manner of a particular period – is, in an important sense,
timeless. I have been working with Donne’s texts for over thirty
years. His poems were set to music even in his own time, by John
Dowland among others. The intellectual energy in Donne’s poetry,
which was always receptive to the metaphysical, is also nurtured
by emotional excitement, and it is this unique combination that
has held such powerful appeal to me as a composer. Despite the
often elaborate construction of his poems, they also have a
singular clarity, a deep longing for harmony, in striking
contrast to the conflicts in love or existence that form their
subject matter. Thus all his warnings, as in The Prohibition,
where he writes “If thou love me, take heed of loving me…”, at
the same time give us new hope. In several of his poems he also
accompanies love literally to the grave, and writes about death
as the ultimate opportunity to achieve the final union of man
and woman, without denying life, ecstasy, the moment.
It
was my friend, Donne expert Dr. C. K. Thomas Tseng, who asked
me, on an ECM tour in Taiwan in 1996, if I could write a John
Donne suite called “The Light” when I, in an earlier attempt to
delve musically into Donne’s poetic universe, had written “The
Shadow”. Later, when we were finishing the work in the recording
studio, Manfred Eicher said that both Four Nordic Songs
and The Light, although they were written four hundred
years apart (and with no comparison intended), dealt with the
same thing – they were Songs of Love and Fear.
Ketil Bjørnstad |