In preparation for the upcoming season I have been gathering texts of the vocal works that the SLSO will be performing to include in the Playbill. All the better for you to follow along as Salome (Deborah Voigt) sings up an ecstatic storm as she prepares to kiss the head of John the Baptist, and such.
The finale to next season is Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. Britten created a kind of musical cross-cutting, as the Latin Mass for the Dead is interspersed with poems by Wilfrid Owen, one of the great English poets of World War I who was cut down in the field a week before the Armistice. The church bells were ringing in his hometown, in celebration of the peace, when the telegram arrived at his parents’ door informing them he was dead.
This is one section of the Owen text to War Requiem:
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenched there,
And streched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so,
but slew his son,--
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
