Rorem: Ariel for soprano, clarinet and piano
American composer Ned Rorem wrote his song cycle Ariel in New York in 1971 as a gift to the prolific soprano Phyllis Curtin, whose voice he remembered as “less beautiful than it was dramatic.” Rorem matched Curtin’s vocal grit to Sylvia Plath’s portrait of a woman’s tortured mind in five of her late poems, and he borrowed the cycle’s title from that of Plath’s 43-poem collection, posthumously published two years after her 1963 suicide. By and large, Plath’s work reflects her lifelong struggle with mental illness and self-harm, which she renders even more haunting through her stripped-down poetic style; her poems tend to be short, often consisting of terse, unrhymed stanzas and uncomplicated, but vivid, diction. Just as Plath grafts mundane images from everyday life and charges them with nightmarish significance, Rorem fashioned sparse textures out of relatively limited musical materials to yield an arresting emotional trajectory over the course of the five-song set. In his musical account of Ariel, Rorem retrogrades the published order of appearance of the five poems in the set (although this original 1965 version of Ariel was itself reordered and reconfigured by Plath’s estranged husband Ted Hughes), so that the song cycle begins with the published collection’s final poem, Words. The slashing dissonances that paint the opening “Axes” cue a general affective zone that Rorem will return to in all three of the cycle’s odd-numbered songs, a volatile sound-world of angular melodic writing, dissonant clusters and rather schizophrenic clarinet lines. By contrast, the second and fourth songs, Poppies in July and Poppies in October, represent hallucinatory oases, daydreams of narcotic dullness told with chilling detachment between the violent episodes that surround them. Lady Lazarus, the song cycle’s morbid last word, was actually the first poem of the collection that Rorem set to music. For her part, Plath mixes the title’s biblical allusion (Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead) with a complex of images derived from Nazism, male oppression and mythology. Rorem responds musically with oblique klezmer references (the augmented second is a salient feature of the movement’s harmonic makeup, and can be read as a marker of that clarinet-centric Jewish folk style) and machinelike instrumental writing that serves to antagonize the singer. Plath’s gruesome poem is commonly understood as a caustic, thinly fictionalized account of her own suicide attempts before an unsympathetic society (“The peanut-crunching crowd”). In 1962, the year before Plath ultimately took her own life, she described her poem to the BBC: “The speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first.”
© Graeme Steele Johnson for The Graduate Center, CUNY
American composer Ned Rorem wrote his song cycle Ariel in New York in 1971 as a gift to the prolific soprano Phyllis Curtin, whose voice he remembered as “less beautiful than it was dramatic.” Rorem matched Curtin’s vocal grit to Sylvia Plath’s portrait of a woman’s tortured mind in five of her late poems, and he borrowed the cycle’s title from that of Plath’s 43-poem collection, posthumously published two years after her 1963 suicide. By and large, Plath’s work reflects her lifelong struggle with mental illness and self-harm, which she renders even more haunting through her stripped-down poetic style; her poems tend to be short, often consisting of terse, unrhymed stanzas and uncomplicated, but vivid, diction. Just as Plath grafts mundane images from everyday life and charges them with nightmarish significance, Rorem fashioned sparse textures out of relatively limited musical materials to yield an arresting emotional trajectory over the course of the five-song set. In his musical account of Ariel, Rorem retrogrades the published order of appearance of the five poems in the set (although this original 1965 version of Ariel was itself reordered and reconfigured by Plath’s estranged husband Ted Hughes), so that the song cycle begins with the published collection’s final poem, Words. The slashing dissonances that paint the opening “Axes” cue a general affective zone that Rorem will return to in all three of the cycle’s odd-numbered songs, a volatile sound-world of angular melodic writing, dissonant clusters and rather schizophrenic clarinet lines. By contrast, the second and fourth songs, Poppies in July and Poppies in October, represent hallucinatory oases, daydreams of narcotic dullness told with chilling detachment between the violent episodes that surround them. Lady Lazarus, the song cycle’s morbid last word, was actually the first poem of the collection that Rorem set to music. For her part, Plath mixes the title’s biblical allusion (Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead) with a complex of images derived from Nazism, male oppression and mythology. Rorem responds musically with oblique klezmer references (the augmented second is a salient feature of the movement’s harmonic makeup, and can be read as a marker of that clarinet-centric Jewish folk style) and machinelike instrumental writing that serves to antagonize the singer. Plath’s gruesome poem is commonly understood as a caustic, thinly fictionalized account of her own suicide attempts before an unsympathetic society (“The peanut-crunching crowd”). In 1962, the year before Plath ultimately took her own life, she described her poem to the BBC: “The speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first.”
© Graeme Steele Johnson for The Graduate Center, CUNY