Classical Music | Soprano

THE SHINING PLACE
Five Poems of Emily Dickenson
Music by Lee Hoiby

Composer's note

The Shining Place is a compilation of songs written for soprano on Emily Dickinson texts. Every American composer must pay her homage, and take a few of her proffered gems. The earliest is The Drowned Boy. Wild Nights and Bugle were written specifically for Leontyne Price who sang them often. With the addition of The Letter I thought that I had a group, and published it as such. Then the singer Cynthia Miller told me that she was uncomfortable starting with so intimate a piece as The Letter and went so far as to commission the most recently written song, which gave its name to the work as a whole. Lee Hoiby

The Shining Place

Me! Come! My dazzled face
In such a shining place!
Me! Hear! My foreign ear
The sounds of welcome near!

The saints shall meet
Our bashful feet.
My holiday shall be
That they remember me;

My paradise, the fame
That they pronounce my name.

A Letter

You ask of my companions. Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a dog large as myself, that my father bought me. They are better than beings because they know, but do not tell; and the noise in the pool at noon excels my piano. I have a brother and a sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind. They are religious, except me, and address an eclipse every morning, whom they call their “Father.” But I fear my story fatigues you. I would like to learn. Could you tell me how to grow, or is it unconveyed, like melody or witchcraft?

How the Waters Closed

How the waters closed above him
We shall never know;
How he stretched his anguish to us,
That is covered too.
Spreads the pond her base of lilies
Bold above the boy
Whose unclaimed hat and jacket
Sum the history.

[Wild Nights

Wild nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile the winds
To a heart in port
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.

Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee!]

There Came a Wind Like a Bugle

There came a wind like a bugle;
It quivered through the grass,
And a green chill upon the heat
So ominous did pass
We barred the windows and the doors
As from an emerald ghost;
The doom’s electric moccasin
That very instant passed.
On a strange mob of panting trees,
And fences fled away,
And rivers where the houses ran
Those looked that lived that day.
The bell within the steeple wild
The flying tidings told.
How much can come
And much can go,
And yet abide the world!